TauP

The TauP Toolkit is a seismic travel time calculator. In addition to travel times, it can calculate derivative information such as ray paths through the earth, pierce and turning points. It handles many types of velocity models and can calculate times for virtually any seismic phase with a phase parser. It is written in Java so it should run on any Java enabled platform.

Download

We have released the next version of TauP, TauP-3.0.1, a major revision. It include many internal improvements as well as new tools.

Note TauP 3.0 requires Java 11 or later.

Homebrew

brew tap crotwell/crotwell && brew install taup

Manually

wget https://zenodo.org/records/15426279/files/TauP-3.0.1.zip

Prior Versions

Older versions are archived here. In addition, the last version 2 release of taup is installable via homebrew for those that have scripts that depend on the older parameters.

brew tap crotwell/crotwell && brew install taup2

The executable will be called taup2. Please note that no further development will occur for this.

The TauP Toolkit is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It was created on 15 May 2025.

Documentation

The documentation for TauP is available at Read The Docs. You can download the original zip file or the tar.gz version containing a draft and the source images of our paper submitted to the Seismological Research Letters.

If you would like TauP and would like to cite it, please use the following: Crotwell, H. P., T. J. Owens, and J. Ritsema (1999). The TauP Toolkit: Flexible seismic travel-time and ray-path utilities, Seismological Research Letters 70, 154–160.

as well as the Zenodo DOI for the version you are using. Crotwell, H. P. (2025). The TauP Toolkit (3.0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15426279

If you have any comments, please email us. . You may also join the TauP email list.

The TauP Toolkit source code is hosted on github here: https://github.com/crotwell/TauP.

The TauP Toolkit jar is also available from maven central with group edu.sc.seis and id TauP.

The TauP Toolkit (version 2) is also used by the IRIS Traveltime web service. It can output the same text and json output as TauP_Time, along with SVG output of TauP_Path, and may be an attactive option for some users. For example, a SVG plot of raypaths could be generated by http://service.iris.edu/irisws/traveltime/1/query?staloc=[35.946,-106.457]&evloc=[-36.122,-72.898]&evdepth=22.9&format=svg.