Research Areas

Seismology

Seismologists worldwide rely on MATLAB to investigate tectonic and anthropogenic seismicity, monitor volcanic activity, and analyze waveform data from various sensor networks. Experts have developed toolboxes that customize MATLAB for seismological data access and analysis.

Discover how you can:

  • Use MATLAB and Signal Processing Toolbox to read, analyze, and compare seismic waveforms (Signal Processing Onramp)
  • Interactively analyze waveforms and automatically generate code with the Signal Analyzer app (Documentation)
  • Read and write miniSEED files with RDMSEED and MKMSEED functions (Toolbox)
  • Download and process earthquake data from the ISC Bulletin with ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB (Toolbox and API)
  • Use the MATLAB app ZMAP7 GUI for seismic data visualization, statistical analysis, and earthquake catalog data research (Toolbox)
  • Explore the MATLAB geodetic toolboxes Stavel and Gridstrain to derive velocity and strain rate fields from GNSS data (Toolboxes)

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Latitudinal and longitudinal plots on a graph to illustrate stress change.

Coulomb is an open-source MATLAB toolbox for earthquake, tectonic, and volcano research and teaching. In Toda et al., 2005 (600 citations), researchers use the Coulomb toolbox to simulate stress changes, deformation patterns, and earthquake triggering in Southern California.

Ocean and Climate

MATLAB enables researchers to analyze and model complex oceanic and atmospheric systems, providing insights into climate change and environmental impacts.


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Hydrology

MATLAB enables complex simulations, statistical analysis, and graphical representations of hydrological data, aiding in tasks such as watershed modeling, flood and landslide prediction, and water quality assessment.


3D topographic plot created with Topotoolbox.

Topotoolbox is an open-source toolbox for analyzing topographic data. It provides tools and an interface for processing digital elevation models (DEMs), enabling the study of landscape evolution, hydrological modeling, and geomorphological analysis.

Agriculture

MATLAB has tools for data analysis, image processing, and smart farming. It enables crop yield prediction, soil moisture analysis, and advanced image-based monitoring. You can use:

  • Hyperspectral image processing functions to detect changes in land cover (Code Example)
  • ThingSpeak and IoT sensors to collect and analyze data for early detection of plant diseases using machine learning models (Case Study)
  • MATLAB to analyse image signals from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for vegetation detection and mapping (Case Study)

Man kneeling over crops with mobile device.

Li et al., 2020, measured plant growth implementing MATLAB for automated image processing. Images collected by smartphones from different harvest days were stored and analyzed on a local computer using the MATLAB mobile app on a smartphone. Then, MATLAB scripts extracted images from the shared folder, processed the images, and estimated the leaf area. Data were stored in the cloud and visualized on the smartphone.