Station Building Strategies Developed During Earthscope Transportable Array – A Retrospective

Date: 4/24/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Fifth Avenue

Between 2004-2015, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) built and operated the National Science Foundation sponsored EarthScope Transportable Array (TA), a network of ~400 seismographs that moved west to east across the conterminous (“Lower 48” or L48) United States to occupy ~1679 stations with an average deployment span of ~22 months at each location. The goal was to gather robust and uniformly spaced measurements of the seismic wavefield at a range of scales and bandwidths for use in the investigation of the geologic structure and geodynamics of the North American continent. To accomplish this, the TA was designed to meet a data performance metric of >85% uptime, minimize gaps in the recorded data, and produce seismic records with low noise to maximize both earthquake detection and seismic imaging techniques.

A detailed description of the approaches used by TA to create (and remove) stations at the rate of 20 per month for several years is available at: http://www.usarray.org/researchers/obs/transportable/l48_ta_report

Highlights from the report are presented in the context of efforts to construct EEW stations in the western US.

Presenting Author: Robert Busby

Authors