The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) is a non-profit scientific organization aiming at establishing and operating a rapid earthquake detection system globally and in particular in the European and Mediterranean regions as well as facilitating exchange between seismological institutes. The EMSC has been a pioneer in citizen seismology by collecting in-situ information on the earthquake impact directly from the witnesses.
The EMSC has been collecting citizen intensity felt reports at a global scale for many years via two channels: its websites and its “LastQuake” smartphone application. These felt reports are collected through a set of 12 cartoons representing the 12 levels of the European Macroseismic Scale (Grünthal, 1998). They provide rapid information on how the earthquake’s impact is felt by the local population. The EMSC felt reports were shown to be consistent with the USGS Did You Feel It? (Wald et al., 2011) responses and with manually derived macroseismic datasets (Bossu et al., 2016).
This dataset includes four ".csv" files in total. The file, "felt_reports_2014_2021.csv" and "catalog_2014_2021.csv" contain an exhaustive set of globally collected felt reports between January 2014 and December 2021, and the corresponding earthquake catalog, respectively. The files "felt_reports_2022.csv" and "catalog_2022.csv" contain felt reports for a selection of 11 well reported earthquakes from 2022 and the corresponding earthquake catalog, respectively. This data is the foundation of the work by Lilienkamp et al. (2023).
FlotteKarte is a low-overhead plotting routine using Matplotlib, NumPy, and PyPROJ under the hood. The conceptual idea behind this package is that a map is fully defined through the 2D cartesian coordinates that result from applying the map projection to different geographical data. For displaying data on a two-dimensional canvas, Matplotlib is a powerful tool. Conversion between geographic and projected coordinates can easily be done using PyProj. The gap between these two powerful tools and a polished map lies in potential difficulties when translating spherical line topology to 2D cartesian space, and by introducing typical map decorations such as grids or ticks. FlotteKarte aims to fill this gap with a simple interface.
FlotteKarte's philosophy is to work completely within the 2D projected coordinates, that is, very close to the projected data. If projected coordinates of data can be obtained, the data can be drawn directly on the underlying Matplotlib Axes. The Map class can then be used to add typical map decoration to that axes using information that it derives from the numerics of the PROJ projection.