Alain Plattner CV
Welcome to the planetary and near-surface geophysics group led by Alain Plattner
We are part of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
You can find more information about current and past research on the research page. The publications page contains links to pdfs of published articles.
Our group studies magnetic fields of planetry bodies in our solar system from satellite data to infer the geologic history and structure of these planetary bodies. To date we have studied the planets Mars and Mercury, and the Jovian moon Ganymede.
We also use near-surface geophysical instrumentation to look into the shallow subsurface here on the Earth. This work is typically with colleagues in archaeology, biology, hydrology, basically any field of study that can profit from information of the shallow subsurface.
Software packages
GPRPy is a free graphical user interface-based ground penetrating radar processing and visualization tool. It is Python based and hence all of its prerequisites are also completely free. If you find GPRPy useful, please cite my GPRPy paper "Plattner, A. M. (2020). Gprpy: open-source ground-penetrating radar processing and visualization software. Leading Edge 39(5), 332–337. doi: 10.1190/tle39050332.1". For news and updates on GPRPy, please follow this Twitter account (gprpysoftware).
For my planetary potential-field geophysics research, my Matlab/Octave software to construct and use classical and altitude-cognizant vector Slepian functions can be conveniently installed using the scripts and demo functions on this Slepian Git repository. The scripts will automatically download the software from Slepian_alpha through Slepian_hotel and setup the folder structure.
Textbook
The textbook for the course GEO 369 can be found here: http://alainplattner.net/gpg. I based it on the textbook GPG (Geophysics for Practicing Geoscientists).
News
December 2023
Our research article on local magnetic source depth inversions got accepted for publication. It is freely available from here
Background figure
The figure in the background shows the recently-discovered core-field anomaly on Mercury, plotted over Mercury's topography.
