x lines of Python: synthetic wedge model

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Welcome to a new blog series! Like the A to Z and the Great Geophysicists, I expect it will be sporadic and unpredictable, but I know you enjoys life's little nonlinearities as much as I.

The idea with this one — x lines of Python — is to share small geoscience workflows in x lines or fewer. I'm not sure about the value of x, but I think 10 seems reasonable for most tasks. If x > 10 then the task may have been too big... If x < 5 then it was probably too small.

Python developer Raymond Hettinger says that each line of code should be equivalent to a sentence... so let's say that that's the measure of what's OK to put in a single line. 

Synthetic wedge model

To kick things off, follow this link to a live Jupyter Notebook environment showing how you can make a simple synthetic three-rock wedge model in only 9 lines of code.

The sentences represented by the code that made the data in these images are:

  1. Set up the size of the model.
  2. Make the slanty bit, with 1's in the wedge and 2's in the base.
  3. Add the top of the model as 0; these numbers will turn into rocks.
  4. Define the velocity and density of rocks 0 to 2.
  5. Distribute those properties through the model.
  6. Calculate the acoustic impedance everywhere.
  7. Calculate the reflection coefficients in the model.
  8. Make a Ricker wavelet.
  9. Convolve the wavelet with the reflection coefficients.

Your turn!

All of the notebooks we share in this series will be hosted on mybinder.org. I'm excited about this because it means you can run and edit them live, without installing anything at all. Give it a go right now.

You can see them on GitHub too, and fork or clone them from there. Note that if you look at the notebook for this post on GitHub, you'll be able to view it, but not change or run code unless you get everything running on your own machine. (To do that, you can more or less follow the instructions in my User Guide to the TLE tutorials).

Please do take this notion of x as 'par' as a challenge. If you'd like to try to shoot under par, please do — and share your efforts. Code golf is a fun way to learn better coding habits. (And maybe some bad ones.) There is a good chance I will shoot some bogies on this course.

We will certainly take requests too — what tasks would you like to see in x lines of Python?