Increasing Colorado’s Seismic Network – New Developments by the Colorado Geological Survey

Date: 4/25/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Grand Ballroom

During 2007-2008, the USArray's Transportable Array (TA) covered the state of Colorado with nearly 60 broadband seismometers in a roughly uniform 80-km spaced grid. The rolling array has since vacated the state with the exception of four stations that the Colorado Geological Survey (CGS) adopted as permanent stations. In addition to the adopted stations, CGS has installed three broadband seismometers at permanent sites and has plans to install a minimum of two more in 2019. While there are several regional networks still scattered throughout Colorado, the goal of the CGS is to cover the state in a dense, uniformly distributed permanent network. With this network, CGS can closely monitor local and small-magnitude seismicity. Many earthquakes below magnitude 2.5 are likely going uncatalogued over much of the state due to the lack of stations within adequate distance of the epicenters. Detecting and locating these events can improve and refine hazard and fault maps which provide valuable information to local and national building codes. There are also still many unanswered questions and research topics in the field of induced seismicity. In Colorado, induced events are typically small, but occasionally, damaging earthquakes occur within the state. Furthermore, there are subsurface features that could be further analyzed with high-resolution seismic tomography, such as the Rio Grande Rift and the Aspen anomaly. We will be presenting the locations of our current network of stations as well as our proposed network layout, introductions to our intended areas of research, and our preliminary event catalog locations. Our objective in sharing these plans with the seismologic community is to provide information about this new source of publicly available data, invite feedback on our proposed network and research objectives, and connect with potential collaborators.

Presenting Author: Kyren R. Bogolub

Authors