How To Start A Libcom Blog

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Introduction

libcomcat is a project designed to provide a Python equivalent to the ANSS ComCat search API. This includes a Python library that provides various classes and functions wrapping around the ComCat API, and a number of command line programs that use those:

findid Find the ID of an event closest to input parameters (time, latitude, longitude). Also can provide the authoritative ID if an event id is provided.
getcsv Generate csv or Excel files with basic earthquake information.
geteventhist Generate csv or Excel files with a history of product submission for an event.
getmags Download all available magnitudes from all sources.
getpager Download information that represents the PAGER exposure and loss results.
getphases Generate csv or Excel files with phase information.
getproduct Download ComCat product contents (shakemap grids, origin quakeml, etc.)

Installation and Dependencies

Mac, Windows, and Linux Users

We recommend using either the Anaconda (https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/) or Miniconda (https://conda.io/miniconda.html) Python distributions. These both use the conda packaging tool, which makes installation of dependencies much simpler. To install either of those packages, see the instructions on the web pages for each.

Installing

libcomcat should work with Python 3.5 and higher versions. It will not work with Python 2.7. Fortunately, it is easy to install a 3.X version of Python within Anaconda or Miniconda. On a Linux or OSX system, open a Terminal window. On Windows systems, open a Powershell terminal. You'll use these command line windows to type the following commands:

conda create -n comcat --channel conda-forge python=3.7 # or 3.8 or 3.9
conda activate comcat
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install libcomcat

Uninstalling and Updating

To uninstall:

conda remove libcomcat

To update:

conda update libcomcat

Motivation

libcomcat is a python wrapper for the Comprehensive Catalog (ComCat), which has a web page interface and API. ComCat contains information in Events which contain Products. Products contain Contents in the form of files, maps, etc.

The ComCat interface is very user friendly, but does not support automation. The API supports automation, but limits the number of events that can be returned to 20,000. libcomcat uses the API in a way that allows for:

Searches returning more than 20,000 eventsource
Automation of product file downloads
Extraction of information in product content files

Documentation

Documentation can be found in the docs folder:

API Documentation
Command Line Interface Documentation

Example Jupyter notebooks show how the API can be used to get and manipulate information from ComCat:

Classes Notebook
Dataframes Notebook
Detailed Event Notebook
Event History Notebook
Magnitude Comparison Notebook
Phase and Magnitude Notebook
Search Notebook

Citation

If you wish to cite this work in your own publication, you may use this DOI: https://doi.org/10.5066/P91WN1UQ