Intellectual Merit: The project supported under this award is for the enhancement and maintenance of the marine seismic processing system SIOSEIS. SIOSEIS is a software package used to enhance and manipulate marine seismic reflection and refraction data on Unix computers (Mac OSX, Sun, PC-Linux, PC CYGWIN). SIOSEIS is actively used worldwide, in numerous NSF funded experiments, and on several UNOLS ships. As with all software, SIOSEIS must be enhanced and maintained as advances are made in seismic recorders, seismic imaging, navigation, and computer technology. In addition, many of the recent seismic recorders do not record their data in standard formats and need custom software to read their data. SIOSEIS has also become a mechanism for making scientists? research algorithms accessible to the larger seismic user community. Much of the recent work on SIOSEIS has enabled scientists to produce seismic images more quickly and easily, in many cases while still at sea. Processing seismic data while at sea allows scientists to modify their science plan based on current observations. The intellectual merit of this proposal is that it will make new seismic processing algorithms available, and these algorithms will permit scientists to create better marine seismic reflection images more quickly.
Broader Impacts: SIOSEIS including all of the new seismic algorithms will be freely available to the entire community over the web. This provides basic capacity building for marine seismology.
