.. _taup_wavefront:

--------------
TauP Wavefront
--------------

TauP Wavefront is similar to TauP Path, but plots the wavefront at timesteps instead of the
ray paths. It also uses a model like TauP Time and
generates  depth versus
angular distances from the epicenter for the phases, but done at time slices instead of depth slices.
The output is in GMT, :cite:t:`GMT`, plot format, and is
placed into the file `taup_wavefront.gmt`.
The colums are distance, depth, time and ray param, although only the first two are used by the GMT script.
If you specify the `-gmt` flag then this
is a complete script with the appropriate `psxy` command prepended, so if you
have GMT installed, you can just:

.. literalinclude:: examples/taup_wavefront_--mod_iasp91_-h_550_-p_s_S_ScS_sS_sScS_--gmt.cmd
  :language: text

and then::

  bash taup_wavefront.gmt

and you have a plot of the wavefronts in `taup_wavefront.pdf`.

Or use --svg to generate a SVG plot

.. literalinclude:: examples/taup_wavefront_--mod_iasp91_-h_550_-p_s_S_ScS_sS_sScS_--color_wavetype_--svg.cmd
  :language: text

that gives:

.. raw:: html
    :file:  examples/taup_wavefront_--mod_iasp91_-h_550_-p_s_S_ScS_sS_sScS_--color_wavetype_--svg

If the one-sided plot is confusing, the :code:`--negdist` flag will mirror the
wavefronts from the positive to the negative side of the figure, making a
more pleasing display.

The web application, via :code:`taup web` has an interesting animation
feature using CSS to turn on and off various timesteps within the output,
allowing a "movie" of the wavefront propagation.

The usage is:

.. literalinclude:: cmdLineHelp/taup_wavefront.usage
  :language: text