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The Network of the Americas as a Distributed Event Streaming Platform

Session: Advances in Real-Time Geophysical Network Operations and Data Analytics [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/23/2021

Presentation Time: 03:45 PM Pacific

Description: 

The Network Of the Americas (NOTA) is an international geoscience project which, in 2018, integrated existing NSF-funded geodetic networks into a single pan-American network that encompassed the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory (USA), TLALOCNet (Mexico) and COCONet (the Caribbean). Although primarily a GNSS network, NOTA also includes strainmeters, seismometers, tiltmeters and meteorological sensors. Today, the network which is managed by UNAVCO for NSF as part of the GAGE facility, consists of over 1,300 sensors, the majority of which are streaming real-time at rates of 1-sps.

The original network was built in the mid 2000’s and has functioned well in recording transient tectonic deformation and measuring tropospheric phenomena. But, by increasing sampling rates, reducing latencies and expanding the range of observations made, the network has become much more useful to a wider community than originally anticipated. Examples include Earthquake and Tsunami Early Warning systems and capturing space weather events. The transition to high rate, low latency measurements plus the need for reliability and failover has meant UNAVCO is rethinking its data flow and internal archiving systems entirely.

In this presentation we will describe the prototype system UNAVCO has been developing to rebuild NOTA as a cloud-native distributed event streaming platform. Each sensor produces a stream of data which is input to a publish-subscribe messaging system such as Kafka. Once in Kafka the data are directed to a long-term TimeScaleDB database which can be queried to retrieve historic data sets. In addition, researchers will be able to subscribe to receive real-time streams at a range of sample rates. This new system has the potential to give UNAVCO the higher throughput, fault-tolerance, reliability and real-time stream processing ability that will both allow us to manage the NOTA sensor network as part of the Internet of Things and make the data sets more usable to those pursing the study of geophysical phenomena using integrated multi-sensor and machine learning approaches.

Presenting Author: Kathleen Hodgkinson

Student Presenter: No

Authors