# Using Tesseroids¶

This is a tutorial about how to use the Tesseroids package. It is a work-in-progress but I have tried to be as complete as possible. If you find that anything is missing, or would like something explained in more detail, please submit a bug report (it’s not that hard).

Any further questions and comments can be e-mail directly to me (leouieda [at] gmail [dot] com).

If you don’t find what you’re looking for here, the cookbook contains several example recipes of using Tesseroids.

## A note about heights and units¶

In order to have a single convention, the word “height” means “height above the Earths surface” and are interpreted as positive up and negative down (i.e., oriented with the z axis of the Local coordinate system). Also, all input units are in SI and decimal degrees. Output of tesspot is in SI, tessgx, tessgy, and tessgz are in mGal, and the tensor components in Eotvos. All other output is also in SI and decimal degrees.

## Getting help information¶

All programs accept the -h and –version flags. -h will print a help message describing the usage, input and output formats and options accepted. –version prints version and license information about the program.

Program tessdefaults prints the default values of constants used in the computations such as: mean Earth radius, pi, gravitational constant, etc.

## Computing the gravitational effect of a tesseroid¶

The tesspot, tessgx, tessgy, tessgz, tessgxx, etc. programs calculate the combined effect of a list of tesseroids on given computation points. The computation points are passed via standard input and do NOT have to be in a regular grid. This allows, for example, computation on points where data was measured. The values calculated are put in the last column of the input points and printed to standard output.

For example, if calculating gz on these points:

lon1 lat1 height1 value1 othervalue1
lon2 lat2 height2 value2 othervalue2
...
lonN latN heightN valueN othervalueN


the output would look something like:

lon1 lat1 height1 value1 othervalue1 gz1
lon2 lat2 height2 value2 othervalue2 gz2
...
lonN latN heightN valueN othervalueN gzN


The input model file should contain one tesseroid per line and have columns formatted as:

W E S N HEIGHT_OF_TOP HEIGHT_OF_BOTTOM DENSITY


HEIGHT_OF_TOP and HEIGHT_OF_BOTTOM are positive if the above the Earth’s surface and negative if bellow.

Note

Remember that HEIGHT_OF_TOP > HEIGHT_OF_BOTTOM!

Use the command line option -h to view a list of all commands available.

Example:

Calculate the field of a tesseroid model having verbose printed and logged to file gz.log and GLQ order 3/3/3. The computation points are in points.txt and the output will be placed in gz_data.txt:

tessgz modelfile.txt -v -lgz.log -o3/3/3 < points.txt > gz_data.txt


## The -a flag¶

The -a flag on tesspot, tessgx, tessgxx, etc., programs disables the automatic recursive dividing of tesseroids to maintain the GLQ accuracy. As a general rule, the tesseroid should be no bigger than a ratio times the distance from the computation point (program tessdefaults prints the value of the size ratios used). The programs automatically break the tesseroids when this criterion is breached. This means that the computations can be performed with the default GLQ order 2/2/2, which is much faster, and still maintain correctness.

Warning

It is strongly recommended that you don’t use this flag unless you know what you are doing! It is also recommended that you keep 2/2/2 order always.

## Verbose and logging to files¶

The -v flag enables printing of information messages to the default error stream (stderr). If omitted, only error messages will appear. The -l flag enables logging of information and error messages to a file.

Comments can be inserted into input files by placing a “#” character at the start of a line. All comment lines are ignored. All programs pass on (print) the comment lines of the input to the output. All programs insert comments about the provenance of their results (where they came from) to their output. These include names of input files, version of program used, date, etc.

## Generating regular grids¶

Included in the package is program tessgrd, which creates a regular grid of points and prints them to standard output.

Example

To generate a regular grid of 100 x 100 points, in the are -10/10/-10/10 degrees, at a height of 250 km:

tessgrd -r-10/10/-10/10 -b100/100 -z250e03 -v > points.txt


## Automatic model generation¶

As of version 1.0, Tesseroids includes program tessmodgen for automatically generating a tesseroid model from a map of an interface. The interface can be any surface deviating from a reference level. For example, topography (a DEM) deviates from 0, a Moho map deviates from a mean crustal thickness, etc. This program takes as input a REGULAR grid with longitude, latitude and height values of the interface. Each tesseroid is generated with a grid point at the center of it’s top face. The top and bottom faces of the tesseroid are defined as:

• Top = Interface and Bottom = Reference if the interface is above the reference
• Top = Reference and Bottom = Interface if the interface is bellow the reference

The density RHO of the tesseroids can be passed using the -d option. This will assign a density value of RHO, when the interface is above the reference, and a value of -RHO if the interface is bellow the reference. Alternatively, the density of each tesseroid can be passed as a forth column on the input grid. As with the -d option, if the interface is bellow the reference, the density value will be multiplied by -1! Also, an error will occur if both a forth column and the -d option are passed!

Example:

To generate a tesseroid model from a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with 1 x 1 degree resolution using a density of 2670 km/m^3:

tessmodgen -s1/1 -d2670 -z0 -v < dem_file.txt > dem_tess_model.txt


## Calculating the total mass of a model¶

The tessmass program can be used to compute the total mass of a given tesseroid model. If desired, a density range can be given and only tesseroids that fall within the given range will be used in the calculation.

Example:

To calculate the total mass of all tesseroids in model.txt with density between 0 and 1 g/cm^3:

tessmass -r0/1000 < model.txt


## Computing the effect of rectangular prisms in Cartesian coordinates¶

Tesseroids 1.0 also introduced programs to calculate the gravitational effect of right rectangular prisms in Cartesian coordinates. This is done using the formula of Nagy et al. (2000). The programs are prismpot, prismgx, prismgy, prismgz, prismgxx, etc. Input and output for these programs is very similar to that of the tesspot, tessgx, etc., programs. Computation points are read from standard input and the prism model is read from a file. The model file should have the column format:

X1 X2 Y1 Y2 Z1 Z2 DENSITY


Note

As in Nagy et al. (2000), the coordinate system for the rectangular prism calculations has X axis pointing North, Y axis pointing East and Z axis pointing Down. This is important to note because it differs from the convention adopted for the tesseroids. In practice, this means that the $$g_{xz}$$ and $$g_{yz}$$ components of the prism and tesseroid will have different signs. This will not be such for the $$g_z$$ component, though, because the convention for tesseroids is to have Z axis Down for this component only. See the Theoretical background section for more details on this.

## Piping¶

Tesseroids was designed with the Unix philosophy in mind:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.


Therefore, all tessg* programs and tessgrd can be piped together to calculate many components on a regular grid.

Example:

Given a tesseroids file model.txt as follows:

-1 1 -1 1 0 -10e03 -500


Running the following would calculate gz and gradient tensor of tesseroids in model.txt of a regular grid from -5W to 5E and -5S to 5N on 100x100 points at 250 km height. And the best of all is that it is done in parallel! If your system has multiple cores, this would mean a great increase in the computation time. All information regarding the computations will be logged to files gz.log, gxx.log, etc. These should include the information about how many times the tesseroid had to be split into smaller ones to guarantee GLQ accuracy:

tessgrd -r-5/5/-5/5 -b100/100 -z250e03 | \
tessgz model.txt -lgz.log | \
tessgxx model.txt -lgxx.log | \
tessgxy model.txt -lgxy.log | \
tessgxz model.txt -lgxz.log | \
tessgyy model.txt -lgyy.log | \
tessgyz model.txt -lgyz.log | \
tessgzz model.txt -lgzz.log > output.txt