Data Services Newsletter

Volume 7 : No 3 : September 2005

New Networks at the DMC: PBO, SAFOD and the Alaska Broadband Regional Network

Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO)

During the month of August 2005, data from borehole and laser strain components of the PBO became available and can now be accessed. Tensor strain and laser strain data are being jointly managed by the IRIS DMC and the Northern California Earthquake Data Center (NCEDC) at Berkeley in a parallel, redundant archive, under the network code PB. One unusual aspect of these data are that they are available in both SEED format through regular request mechanisms (http://ds.iris.edu/data/using.htm) and the raw datalogger format called “Ice9” for laser strain, and “bottle” format from the Gladwin borehole tensor strain instruments. One reason for this is that strain data require substantial QC and validation, and access to these raw data is important. As of the writing of this article, 3 tensor strain, (borehole), sites are operational in Washington state, and two laser strain sites are operational in California. If you want to download the “raw” data (in tar files), you can access these via this URL, where the two types are referred to as either “bsm” for borehole, or “lsm” for laser strain: http://ds.iris.edu/pbo/

For further updates and information related to this growing data collection effort, refer to http://pboweb.unavco.org/

San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD)

The IRIS DMC is currently archiving data from a project conducted at the SAFOD borehole by the company Paulsson Geophysical Services. These data were collected from April 29 to May 11, 2005. This is an array consisting of 240 elements over 80 levels, and recorded at 4kHz. The data are being transferred on LTO-2 tape media and stored at the DMC on the tape-based mass storage StorageTek Powderhorn hardware. This project is anticipated being completed by the end of September 2005.

Alaska Broadband Regional Network

The Alaska Earthquake Information Center (AEIC) made available metadata that describes 30 additional broadband stations operating in Alaska on March 31, 2005. This allowed us to archive data that were collected beginning on October 18, 2002. There are currently 31 stations collecting data in real-time at the IRIS DMC. The network code for these data is AK.

by Rick Benson (IRIS Data Management Center)

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