New Textbook on Data Acquisition in Geosciences

Martin H. Trauth from the Institute of Geosciences has published his third textbook on data analysis in the geosciences with SpringerNature. After the books "MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences, 5th Edition" and "Collecting, Processing and Presenting Geoscientific Information", he now presents a book on data acquisition entitled "Signal and Noise in Geosciences". The new textbook “Signal and Noise in Geosciences” (Springer 2021) introduces methods of data acquisition in geosciences using MATLAB together with inexpensive data acquisition systems, such as the sensors on board of smartphones, sensors that come with the LEGO MINDSTORMS set, webcams with stereo microphones, affordable spectral and thermal cameras.

The text includes numerous experiments on data acquisition, such as acquiring stereo images with smartphones to calculate point clouds from rock specimens, using visible and near-infrared spectral cameras to classify minerals in rocks, using thermal cameras to differentiate between substances such as soils and vegetation, localizing a sound source using travel time differences between pairs of microphones, quantifying the total harmonic distortion and signal-to-noise ratio of acoustic and elastic signals, acquiring and streaming meteorological data using application programming interfaces, wireless networks, and internet of things platforms, determining the spatial resolution of ultrasonic and optical sensors, and detecting magnetic anomalies using a smartphone magnetometer mounted on a LEGO MINDSTORMS scanner.