2.1 MATLAB in Earth Sciences

MATLAB is a software package developed by The MathWorks Inc. (http://www.mathworks.com) founded by Jack Little and Cleve Moler in 1984 and headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts. MATLAB was designed to perform mathematical calculations, to analyze and visualize data, and write new software programs. The advantage of this software is the combination of comprehensive math and graphics functions with a powerful high-level language. Since MATLAB contains a large library of ready-to-use routines for a wide range of applications, the user can solve technical computing problems much faster than with traditional programming languages, such as C, C++, and FORTRAN. The standard library of functions can be significantly expanded by add-on toolboxes, which are collections of functions for special purposes such as image processing, building map displays, performing geospatial data analysis or solving partial differential equations.

During the last few years, MATLAB has become an increasingly popular tool in the field of earth sciences. It has been used for finite element modeling, the processing of seismic data and satellite images as well as for the generation of digital elevation models from satellite images. The continuing popularity of the software is also apparent in the scientific reference literature. A large number of conference presentations and scientific publications have made reference to MATLAB. Similarly, a large number of the computer codes in the leading Elsevier journal Computers and Geosciences are now written in MATLAB. It appears that the software has taken over FORTRAN in terms of popularity.

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