HR: 1400h
AN: S23A-06    [Abstracts]
TI: The Budget Guide to Seismic Network Management
AU: * Hagerty, M T
EM: hagertmb@bc.edu
AF: Weston Observatory, Boston College, 381 Concord Rd, Weston, MA 02493, United States
AU: Ebel, J E
EM: ebel@bc.edu
AF: Weston Observatory, Boston College, 381 Concord Rd, Weston, MA 02493, United States
AB: Regardless of their size, there are certain tasks that all seismic networks must perform, including data collection and processing, earthquake location, information dissemination, and quality control. Small seismic networks are unlikely to possess the resources -- manpower and money -- required to do much in-house development. Fortunately, there are a lot of free or inexpensive software solutions available that are able to perform many of the required tasks. Often the available solutions are all-in-one turnkey packages designed and developed for much larger seismic networks, and the cost of adapting them to a smaller network must be weighed against the ease with which other, non-seismic software can be adapted to the same task. We describe here the software and hardware choices we have made for the New England Seismic Network (NESN), a sparse regional seismic network responsible for monitoring and reporting all seismicity within the New England region in the northeastern U.S. We have chosen to use a cost-effective approach to monitoring using free, off-the-shelf solutions where available (e.g., Earthworm, HYP2000) and modifying freeware solutions when it is easier than trying to adapt a large, complicated package. We have selected for use software that is: free, likely to receive continued support from the seismic or, preferably, larger internet community, and modular. Modularity is key to our design because it ensures that if one component of our processing system becomes obsolete, we can insert a suitable replacement with few modifications to the other modules. Our automated event detection, identification and location system is based on a wavelet transform analysis of station data that arrive continuously via TCP/IP transmission over the internet. Our system for interactive analyst review of seismic events and remote system monitoring utilizes a combination of Earthworm modules, Perl cgi-bin scripts, Java, and native Unix commands and can now be carried out via internet browser from anywhere in the world. With our current communication and processing system we are able to achieve a monitoring threshold of about M2.0 for most New England, in spite of high cultural noise and sparse station distribution, and maintain an extremely high rate of data recovery, for minimal cost.
UR: http:quake.bc.edu:8000
DE: 7215 Earthquake source observations (1240)
DE: 7219 Seismic monitoring and test-ban treaty verification
DE: 7290 Computational seismology
DE: 7294 Seismic instruments and networks (0935, 3025)
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly