New subcommittee on data-exchange formats for EM Field data

Technical Standards Committee invites participation in subcommittee on self-describing data-exchange formats for marine EM field data

At last year’s Technical Standards Committee (TSC) meeting at the SEG Annual Meeting in Denver, several attendees expressed interest in self-describing binary data formats to facilitate the exchange of marine electromagnetic (EM) field data. Therefore the TSC is forming a subcommittee with this focus.

Open-source, self-describing data formats such as HDF or NetCDF are being used by a large number of organizations worldwide to meet their scientific data management and exchange needs (see www.hdfgroup.org and www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf). In recent years, these formats also have gained popularity with a number of geophysical contractors and oil companies for storing and processing marine EM data.

The goal of this TSC subcommittee will be to define a common standard for exchanging marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) and magnetotelluric (MT) field data. The subcommittee will be evaluating self-describing formats like the most recent version of HDF (HDF5) to define how the format should be used for storing EM data types.

People and organizations wishing to contribute to this effort, either by providing input to the subcommittee or active subcommittee participation, are kindly requested to contact the TSC chair, Rune Hagelund (rune.hagelund@roxar.com), or the subcommittee chairman, Friedrich Roth (froth@emgs.com). Regular status updates on the subcommittee’s work will be made available on www.seg.org.