taupTraveltime: Return seismic travel time information using 'The TauP...

In IRISSeismic: Classes and Methods for Seismic Data Analysis

Return seismic travel time information using The TauP Toolkit

Description

The taupTraveltime function returns seismic travel time data computed using The TauP Toolkit (Crotwell, et al., 1999).

software: The TauP Toolkit, version 3.1.0, released 2025-08-15 author: Crotwell, H. Philip [e-mail] repository-code: https://github.com/crotwell/TauP url: http://www.seis.sc.edu/TauP/ repository: \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.5281/zenodo.10794857")}

Usage

taupTraveltime(latitude, longitude, depth = 0, staLatitude, staLongitude)

Arguments

latitude	latitude of seismic event
longitude	longitude of seismic event
depth	depth of seismic event
staLatitude	latitude of seismic station
staLongitude	longitude of seismic station

Details

taupTraveltime is a wrapper for the travel time functionality of The TauP Toolkit. It returns seismic travel times, calculated using a 1-D spherical model, in a dataframe. It is written to replace the deprecated getTraveltime function that retrieved seismic travel time information from EarthScope web services.

software: The TauP Toolkit, version 3.1.0, released 2025-08-15 author: Crotwell, H. Philip [e-mail] repository-code: https://github.com/crotwell/TauP url: http://www.seis.sc.edu/TauP/ repository: \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.5281/zenodo.10794857")}

A modified version of the TauP Toolkit can be used by setting an environmental variable TAUP_JAR_DIR that points to a local directory containing the jar files in the lib directory of TauP.

Value

A dataframe with the following columns:

distance, depth, phaseName, travelTime, rayParam, takeoff, incident
  puristDistance, puristName 

Rows are ordered by travel time.

Author(s)

Gillian Sharer [e-mail]

References

Crotwell, H. P., T. J. Owens, J. Ritsema (1999). The TauP Toolkit: Flexible seismic travel-time and ray-path utilities, Seismological Research Letters 70, 154–160.

Examples

## Not run: 

# Two days around the "Nisqually Quake"
iris <- new('IrisClient')
starttime <- as.POSIXct("2001-02-27", tz="GMT")
endtime <- starttime + 3600 * 24 * 2

# Find biggest seismic event over these two days -- it's the "Nisqually"
events <- getEvent(iris, starttime, endtime, minmag=5.0)
bigOneIndex <- which(events$magnitude == max(events$magnitude))
bigOne <- events[bigOneIndex[1],]

# Find US stations that are available within an hour of the event
start <- bigOne$time
end <- start + 3600
availability <- getChannel(iris, "US", "", "", "BHZ",
                           starttime=start, endtime=end,
                           latitude=bigOne$latitude, longitude=bigOne$longitude,
                           minradius=0, maxradius=10)
    
# Get the station the furthest East
minLonIndex <- which(availability$longitude == max(availability$longitude))
snclE <- availability[minLonIndex,]

# Plot the BHZ signal from this station
st <- getDataselect(iris,snclE$network,snclE$station,snclE$location,snclE$channel,
                    start,end)

# Check that there is only a single trace and then plot it
length(st@traces)
tr <- st@traces[[1]]
plot(tr, subsampling=1) # need subsmpling=1 to add vertical lines with abline()

# Find travel times to this station
traveltimes <- taupTraveltime(bigOne$latitude, bigOne$longitude, bigOne$depth,
                             snclE$latitude, snclE$longitude)

# Look at the list                             
traveltimes

# mark the P and S arrival times
pArrival <- start + traveltimes$travelTime[traveltimes$phaseName=="P"]
sArrival <- start + traveltimes$travelTime[traveltimes$phaseName=="S"] 
abline(v=pArrival, col='red')
abline(v=sArrival, col='blue')

## End(Not run)

IRISSeismic documentation built on July 21, 2026, 9:07 a.m.