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Monitoring Performance at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center

Session: Network Seismology: Keeping the Network Running While Integrating New Technologies [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/22/2021

Presentation Time: 11:30 AM Pacific

Description: 

The core mission of the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) is to rapidly and accurately determine the location, size and impact of significant earthquakes both domestically and globally. The NEIC continues to develop and employ new algorithms and procedures aimed at improving its ability to fulfill this mission. These continual improvements vary dramatically in complexity and scope. Recent improvements include operationalizing new detection and association algorithms, determining criteria to test the publication of rapid automatic solutions, and integrating near-real-time parametric data from other global networks. In order to ensure that these changes improve NEIC’s overall capabilities, it is critical that the performance of the NEIC is continuously monitored and evaluated. In this effort, the NEIC has been developing a suite of metrics and tools to evaluate the ongoing quality of NEIC’s performance. Critical to this is process is determining metrics that capture the full range of factors that affect NEIC’s performance, such as its ability to detect earthquakes, its ability to rapidly process large earthquake sequences, and the workload placed on human analysts. We discuss these tools, and the observed changes in NEIC’s performance as the result of recent algorithm updates. For example, we show that recent changes in NEIC’s associator and picker significantly improved NEIC’s ability to automatically detect M2.5 earthquakes in Advanced National Seismic System regions, therefore dramatically improving NEIC’s ability to support regional networks. We also look at metrics evaluating NEIC’s recent efforts to publish global automatic solutions in our internal development systems.

Presenting Author: William L. Yeck

Student Presenter: No

Authors