APASVO: A free software tool for automatic P-phase picking and event detection in seismic traces

The accurate estimation of the arrival time of seismic waves or picking is a problem of major interest in seismic research given its relevance in many seismological applications, such as earthquake source location and active seismic tomography. In the last decades, several automatic picking methods have been proposed with the ultimate goal of implementing picking algorithms whose results are comparable to those obtained by manual picking. In order to facilitate the use of these automated methods in the analysis of seismic traces, this paper presents a new free, open source, software graphical tool, named APASVO, which allows picking tasks in an easy and user-friendly way. The tool also provides event detection functionality, where a relatively imprecise estimation of the onset time is sufficient. The application implements the STA-LTA detection algorithm and the AMPA picking algorithm. An autoregressive AIC-based picking method can also be applied. Besides, this graphical tool is complemented with two additional command line tools, an event picking tool and a synthetic earthquake generator. APASVO is a multiplatform tool that works on Windows, Linux and OS X. The application can process data in a large variety of file formats. It is implemented in Python and relies on well-known scientific computing packages such as ObsPy, NumPy, SciPy and Matplotlib.