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Motus: The u.s. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center's New Earthquake Monitoring System

Description: 

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center’s (NEIC) real-time global monitoring system, Hydra, supports the NEIC missions to detect earthquakes, estimate source parameters, and produce a reviewed earthquake bulletin. The NEIC has used Hydra for over fifteen years and continues to develop it to meet NEIC’s evolving needs. Throughout this time, developers and researchers have made several significant algorithmic advancements to the Hydra system to improve its ability to characterize earthquakes, including the addition of new moment tensor techniques, waveform modeling for earthquake depth, machine learning to characterize seismic phases, and a local-to-global scale arrival time associator.

However, due to the age of the technologies that underpin Hydra, the system does not easily support rapid development and the ability to leverage new software technologies. This hinders the NEIC’s capability to integrate new algorithms, make changes to analyst procedures, and support research into novel monitoring processes. Therefore, the NEIC has begun the processes of evolving the Hydra system into a new system, Motus, that will fundamentally advance our operational and developmental capabilities.

The Motus system is underpinned by a significant shift in the NEIC’s system design framework towards a service-oriented architecture to allow for more rapid development, testing, and research. We will present our recent work to create web-based data services, modern user interfaces, containerized deployment environments, and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipelines. We will also present new seismic analysis interfaces designed to allow analysts to quickly classify and publish high-quality automated solutions. Finally, we will discuss the challenges and lessons learned using our approach of evolving and updating an existing system with new features and new methods, while maintaining our existing 24/7 mission critical operations.

Session: Emerging Developments in Operational Monitoring Systems and Products [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/18/2023

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: John Patton

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors