Provide students with programming skills useful for modelling earth-science related phenomena.
Regarding the Dublin indicators, the course prepares as follows:
•Knowledge and understanding: acquire knowledge that allows you to represent the evolution of a study area in terms of geological-geophysical data.
• Ability to apply knowledge and understanding: ability to use Matlab in basic applications such as reading and representation of images and data, evaluation and geostatistical interpretation of the same and graphic mapping.
• Making judgements: understand how to use Matlab scripting tools to help represent geological data.
• Communication skills: ability to illustrate processes occurring on earth through computational resources by discussing data and results with interested parties.
• Ability to learn: Ability to independently integrate different sources (textbooks, literature articles, existing software) to represent and study geological-geophysical data and images.

Basics of Mathematics (as from Istituzioni di Matematiche A)

The Study of Planet Earth:
1. Extracting Information from Images:
Identifying lithological units, ground changes due to seismic and volcanic events.
Automated analysis of microscope images and recognition techniques.
Measuring varve thickness and deducing paleoclimatic information.
Basics of Matlab programming will be provided.
2. Applications:
a) Physical rocks parameters calculation (velocity, density, porosity, permeability). Analyses of their relationships.
B) Anlyses of an earthquakes database (relationship between depth and magnitudo).
C) Statistical analyses of meteorological data.

Trauth, M.H. (2021) MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences – Fifth Edition. Springer International Publishing, 517 p., Supplementary Electronic Material, Hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-030-38440-1. (MRES)
Dave Heslop, An Introduction to MATLAB for Geoscientists
Online Edition: November 2012

1. Image Processing
1.1 Matlab environment and main scripting concepts.
1.2 Image representation in Matlab.
1.3 Enhancing and manipulating an image to highlight areas of interest. Tracking changes in the observed territory from images taken at different times.
1.4 Highlighting particular areas of interest in an image.
1.5 Temporal analysis of varve deposition and paleoclimatic implications from an image.
1.6 Automated identification of objects present in a microscope image.

2. Modeling of the physical rocks’ parameters
2.1. Introduction to the physical rocks’ parameters.
2.2. Calculation of the physical rocks’ parameters.
2.3 Case studies.
3. Earthquakes distribution in study areas
3.1 Relationships between depth and magnitude of earthquakes.
3.2 Temporal analysis of earthquakes distribution.
4. Meteorological parameters
4.1 Temporal analysis of variability of meteorological parameters.
4.2 Relationships between meteorological parameters.
4.3 Histograms and statistical analysis of meteorological parameters.

Lectures and Matlab hands-on training

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Oral exam with discussion of assigned exercises. The oral examination is aimed at evaluating both the student's knowledge of theoretical arguments and his ability to solve on the computer simple modelling problems and digital image analysis by means of Matlab.

This course explores topics closely related to one or more goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs)