SCSN Advanced Telemetry Planning Tools and Real-Time System Monitoring

Session: Earthquake Early Warning: Current Status and Latest Innovations [Poster]
Type: Poster
Date: 4/29/2020
Time: 08:00 AM
Room: Ballroom
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.

For more than 380 seismic stations currently installed, we are building tools to evaluate the value of their contribution to ShakeAlert. Which stations would have the biggest impact on ShakeAlert if they were improved? The answer is critical for planning station maintenance and new station installations.

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.

Another goal is to improve telemetry by installing new spread-spectrum radios. We seek to optimize the radio communication parameters to get the best possible throughput and lowest latency. We monitor the signal strength and other diagnostic values and track how they change over time in response to a changing environment. The results will enable us to build a statistical model for the performance based on the radio parameters.

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. This microwave network will acquire data streams from approximately 100 sites, which will improve speed and completeness of data delivery.

Presenting Author: Igor Stubailo

Authors