Sunday, January 06, 2013

Arizona earthquake records actively downloaded



Signals from the 7 monitoring stations in the Arizona Broadband Seismic Network are fed into the IRIS Data Management Center in Vancouver, Washington, which stores earthquake records from most seismic stations in the US.     

For the 4th quarter of 2012, the volume of data requested from the Arizona network was 151 requests, totaling 1,184,574 Kb (~1.2 Gb), and 1933 seismograms.  [Right, seismograms from the August 26, 2012 Brawley CA magnitude 5.5 earthquake as recorded by Arizona instruments]

Although we don't have a list of who specifically downloaded the data, it's expected that it includes seismologists at the USGS who are determining epicentral locations, researchers studying regional seismicity and crustal geology, and geotechnical specialists evaluating seismic potential at existing and proposed sites for critical structures (power plants, bridges, dams, etc).

The network was set up and run initially from a FEMA grant.   It is now operating with an anonymous one-year grant from a major corporate donor in Arizona.  We are looking for funding to keep the network operating.  There is no state funding for the seismic network.


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