Important skills for any geoscientist to master include finding, understanding, and applying software tools to geoscience problems. Examples of day-to-day tasks that require great computational skills from Geoscientists include:

Critical computational skills for Geoscientists:

  1. reducing raw instrument signals into useable data
  2. writing, sharing, and maintaining high-quality code (libraries) for community research
  3. gathering data from (or contributing data to) community repositories
  4. visualizing and communicating data with compelling graphics
  5. cleaning, structuring, and maintaining high-quality data assets for future use

Individuals and groups developing code for geoscience applications enable research in my own lab. As such, I feel compelled to promote their work. Below are my top picks1 for software packages every geoscience graduate student should know and love.

gstat

sf

GPlates

GemPy

Underworld

ASPECT

  1. See a more comprehensive list curated by the Software Underground group with well-defined criteria. ↩