Development of the MTpy software package for magnetotelluric data analysis

Abstract

The magnetotelluric (MT) method is becoming more widely used in the geoscience community as it becomes increasingly recognised as a useful exploration tool. However, while the analysis and inversion tools available to the MT community have increased over recent years, the software available to work with these tools is still somewhat limited and often costly in comparison to some of the more mature techniques like gravity, magnetics and seismic. The MTpy python library is open source software that aims to assist MT practitioners in carrying out the processing and analysis steps that need to be carried out with MT data and in working with the various inversion codes that are available. However, MTpy still contains coding issues, bugs and gaps in functionality, which have limited its use to date. We are currently developing MTpy to rectify these problems and expand the functionality, and thus facilitate the use of MT as an exploration technique. Key improvements include adding new functions and modules, refactoring the code to give better quality and consistency, fixing bugs and adding new Graphic User Interfaces.