Sunday, September 12, 2010 (8:00am - 5:00pm)
Palm Canyon Room, Hilton Palm Springs, Palm Springs, California

Coulomb is designed to investigate Coulomb stress changes on faults, dikes, and earthquake nodal planes, and is intended for publication-directed research and university teaching

Coulomb will be taught by Ross Stein (USGS), Shinji Toda (Kyoto Univ), Jian Lin (Woods Hole) and Volkan Sevilgen (USGS) in a free, full-day course guaranteed to turn novices into experts. There are 1600 registered Coulomb users worldwide, so you don't have to take the class to use Coulomb, but you will learn faster with us. You'll receive a bound User Guide, and you'll download Coulomb onto your own laptop beforehand for the course. We use the 'push-pull' teaching method, with one maniac in front of the room keying and talking, and the other 3 working behind the participants, giving individual attention and slowing the leader down when needed: No one gets lost! We can only accommodate 40 people.

The program, user guide, and tutorial files are freely available from http://www.coulombstress.org. Coulomb runs on Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes. It is a MATLAB application, so you'll need to install MATLAB 7.4 or later. We will have a temporary site license for MATLAB at course. You will be asked to register Coulomb when you first launch.

Why Coulomb?

We learn best when we can see and explore alternatives quickly. So Coulomb's principal features are ease of input, rapid interactive modification, and intuitive visualization of the results. Coulomb calculates displacements, strains, and stresses caused by fault slip, magmatic intrusion or dike expansion. Typical uses are how an earthquake promotes or inhibits failure on nearby faults, or how fault slip or dike expansion will compress a nearby magma chamber. Geologic deformation associated with faults and fault-bend folds is also a useful application. Calculations are made in an elastic halfspace with uniform isotropic elastic properties following Okada [1992]. The internal graphics are intended for publication, and can be imported into Google Earth, illustration or animation programs.

Class Plan

In the morning, we'll introduce you to Coulomb analysis and explain our approach to modeling. Then you'll learn how to build and use input files, add active faults, earthquakes, and coastlines, calculate displacements and strains, and create publication-quality PDF and numerical output files. We'll also show you how to taper or tile the fault slip, and how to import the SCEC faults and variable-slip source models from databases. In the afternoon, we'll drink a lot of espresso, and will focus on Coulomb stress analysis for seismic and volcanic investigations, and show you how to display your results in Google Earth. We'll let you resolve stress changes on faults in their rake directions or on optimal planes. You'll learn how to view all these results graphically in 3D or to output numerical tables.