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Redundant Telemetry, System Monitoring, and Planning Tools for a Highly Resilient and Secure Regional Seismic Network (RSN)

Description: 

The Caltech/USGS Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) is a modern digital ground motion seismic network. It develops and maintains data acquisition and delivery systems for rapid earthquake information products like earthquake origins, magnitude, and ShakeMap as well as for Earthquake Early Warning (ShakeAlert).

Here we present recent and ongoing innovations in telemetry, system monitoring, and planning tools that keep the network running efficiently and provide timely high-quality streaming data.

Our goal is to improve telemetry by making it more resilient and secure. Most of SCSN sites deliver data continuously to the cloud (AWS) and terrestrial servers located on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. This allows SCSN to keep processing data during extreme events. We also try to diversify the telemetry at each site to be less dependent on one type of hardware and service providers by using cell modems, SS radios of 900 and 700 Hz, regular satellite and Starlink, direct internet connections, microwave, and 4.9GHz public safety connections. We continue to improve the telemetry path diversity, minimize data transfer latency, and increase available bandwidth. We are in the process of connecting the SCSN sites to the California State Microwave Tower backbone in collaboration with CalOES PSC. We have also established VPN connections to most of our sites to keep the data encrypted.

We developed tools to monitor the system state of health, including regular measurements of data transport latency and telemetry link bandwidth from each datalogger to the data center. Using these results, we prioritize low-performing sites for improvements based on their importance for ShakeAlert. For newly installed sites, we track if they meet our latency and bandwidth targets.

For more than 390 seismic stations currently installed, we are building tools to evaluate the value of their contribution to ShakeAlert, real-time earthquake detection and data archiving. To identify which stations would have the biggest impact if they were improved? The answer is critical for planning station maintenance and new station installations.

Session: Earthquake Early Warning Optimization and Efficacy [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/20/2023

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Igor Stubailo

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors