PmagPy Online: Jupyter Notebooks, the PmagPy Software Package and the
Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) Database
Abstract
The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC), hosted at
http://earthref.org/MagIC is a database that serves as a Findable,
Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) archive for paleomagnetic and
rock magnetic data. It has a flexible, comprehensive data model that can
accomodate most kinds of paleomagnetic data. The **PmagPy** software
package is a cross-platform and open-source set of tools written in
Python for the analysis of paleomagnetic data that serves as one
interface to MagIC, accommodating various levels of user expertise. It
is available through github.com/PmagPy. Because PmagPy requires
installation of Python, several non-standard Python modules, and the
PmagPy software package, there is a speed bump for many practitioners on
beginning to use the software. In order to make the software and MagIC
more accessible to the broad spectrum of scientists interested in paleo
and rock magnetism, we have prepared a set of Jupyter notebooks, hosted
on [jupyterhub.earthref.org](https://jupyterhub.earthref.org) which
serve a set of purposes. 1) There is a complete course in Python for
Earth Scientists, 2) a set of notebooks that introduce PmagPy (pulling
the software package from the github repository) and illustrate how it
can be used to create data products and figures for typical papers, and
3) show how to prepare data from the laboratory to upload into the MagIC
database. The latter will satisfy expectations from NSF for data
archiving and for example the AGU publication data archiving
requirements.