Pål Wessel (August 31, 1959 – March 26, 2024)[3] pronounced as, and also known as Paul Wessel, was a professor of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Wessel was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
[4] In the 1980s, Wessel and Walter H. F. Smith created Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), an open-source collection of computer software tools for processing and displaying geographic and Cartesian datasets.
[5] They later supplemented this with the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database (GSHHS) that they constructed from two public domain data sets, the World Data Bank II (WDB), also known as CIA Data Bank, and the World Vector Shoreline (WVS) data set.
[6] Areas in which Wessel conducted research included: