On Friday, May 3rd, 2024, the Offshore Geodesy project team attended a workshop led by SSEC Senior Software Engineer Don Setiawan. The workshop included Professor David Schmidt and Post Doctoral Researcher John DeSanto, as well as Jesse Hutchinson from Ocean Networks Canada and SSEC Research Scholar Madhav Kashyap. The group reviewed progress made on the GNATSS Python Package, used for tracking the movement of subsea tectonic plates with a variety of instrumentation. After spending over a year working on the project, porting and improving the original Fortan77 scripts, the SSEC team took this opportunity to share the framework in its updated state. 

The day was a mix of discussion on domain specific analysis and Python package maintenance. The morning session covered different functions and processing steps, starting with installation and setup instructions, and finishing with applying the tools to their own data. Schmidt, DeSanto, and Hutchinson were able to work through various use cases and transformations. They provided feedback and suggested improvements that might ease community-wide adoption of the GNATSS tool by researchers from Japan to France. These conversations create possibilities for new features that will ideally be contributed by users and developers from within the seafloor geodesy community.

The second half of the workshop was spent in understanding GitHub open-source workflows and how to lay strong foundation for future community contributions. Setiawan also covered the Numba runtime compiler and Python programming best practices to ensure that the researchers learn how to maintain the repository going forward. Friday’s session served as valuable training on how to best to steward the project as an ongoing open-source community driven effort.