The IRIS DMC’s Earth Model Collaboration (EMC)

The Earth Model Collaboration (EMC) is an IRIS DMC data product that serves as a community-supported repository of Earth models. The aim is to provide access to various Earth models with a uniform format and visualization tools for model preview and comparison. EMC currently contains 23 3-D seismic velocity models, one 3-D electrical conductivity model, one 3-D seismic attenuation (Q) model and seven 1-D reference Earth models. New contributions are encouraged and instructions are provided for model authors who wish to share their model via EMC.

All contributed Earth models are hosted in their original format and a version in netCDF format (network Common Data Form). The EMC model overview pages provide summaries of the contributed models and links to more detailed metadata and description pages.

Taking advantage of the unified netCDF format of the models, EMC provides a set of online 2D visualization tools that allow users to produce a variety of horizontal slices, vertical slices and velocity profiles from the Earth models. Auxiliary data such as topography, earthquake locations, plate boundaries, etc. may also be included on these plots. Extension of the EMC visualization tools to 3D is currently underway. The intention is to bridge the gap between 2D model slices and advanced 3D modeling packages, such as IDV and ParaView, with simple 3D visualization capabilities that can be learned and applied within minutes.