SHTOOLS is an archive of Python and Fortran 95 software that can be used to perform spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions, multitaper spectral analyses on the sphere, expansions of functions into Slepian bases, and standard operations on global gravitational and magnetic field data.

Features

SHTOOLS is extremely versatile:

  • All standard normalizations of the spherical harmonic functions are supported (4π normalized, Schmidt semi-normalized, orthonormalized, and unnormalized).

  • Both real and complex spherical harmonics are supported.

  • Spherical harmonic transforms are calculated by exact quadrature rules using either the sampling theorem of Driscoll and Healy (1994) or Gauss-Legendre quadrature.

  • One can choose to use or exclude the Condon-Shortley phase factor of (-1)m with the associated Legendre functions.

  • Localized multitaper spectral analyses and expansions of functions in localized Slepian bases are easily performed.

  • Standard operations on global gravitational and magnetic field data are supported.

  • The Fortran routines are OpenMP compatible and OpenMP thread-safe.

  • The spherical harmonic transforms are accurate to approximately degree 2800.

  • The routines are fast. Spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions take on the order of 1 second for bandwidths close to 800 and about 30 seconds for bandwidths close to 2600.

Installation

The Python components of SHTOOLS can be installed using the Python package manager pip. Binaries are pre-built for linux, macOS, and windows architectures, and you need only to execute the following command in a unix terminal:

pip install pyshtools

To install the Fortran 95 components for use in your Fortran programs, installation can be as simple as executing the following command in the SHTOOLS directory

make fortran
make fortran-mp  # (for OpenMP)

or by using the brew package manager (macOS)

brew tap shtools/shtools
brew install shtools

Using

SHTOOLS can be invoked in any Fortran 95 or Python program. The core software is written in Fortran 95, and Python wrappers allow simple access to the fortran-compiled routines. A variety of Python notebooks and example files are included that demonstrate the major features of the library. SHTOOLS is open source software (3-clause BSD license).

Citation

Mark A. Wieczorek and Matthias Meschede (2018). SHTools — Tools for working with spherical harmonics, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, doi:10.1029/2018GC007529.

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