Welcome to the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) mailing list - this is the first issue of our new quarterly newsletter, "The Data Center Chronicle." This electronic newsletter will be archived online at www.data.scec.org/about/chronicle/.
The Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) operates at the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech and is the primary archive of earthquake data for southern California. The SCEDC maintains an easily accessible, high-quality, searchable archive of earthquake information from 1932 to present.
If you do not want to be on this email list, instructions on how to unsubscribe are at the end of this message.
Contents:
A. New Southern California Earthquake Data Center Website
B. Continuous Data Recording of Significant Earthquakes
C. What's new with STP (Seismic Transfer Program)?
D. Scanning of Analog Records
E. Temporary Deployment Data Now Available
F. How to unsubscribe from/subscribe to the SCEDC mailing list
A. New Southern California Earthquake Data Center Website
The SCEDC has developed a new website at new URL: http://www.data.scec.org .
The new website is our primary site as of December 15, 2003. The "old" pages will forward you to the new site, but if you are a regular visitor to our pages, you may want to update your bookmarks. Additionally, if you have links to our previous website (www.scecdc.scec.org), please update your links to reflect our new URL.
In redesigning the SCEDC website, we made an effort to:
-
• Improve the visual appeal of the website.
• Improve navigation of the site to allow users to get to our most popular webpages
with the fewest mouse-clicks.
• Increase the amount of useful documentation describing data we provide,
methods used, metadata and information on accessing the data and tools
we provide.
• Improve our communication and outreach in spite of our limited human
resources, as well as solicit input from the user community on how to improve
our operation.
• Collect better metrics on Data Center usage and publish these statistics on a
regular basis.
Please send your questions, comments, suggestions or any other feedback on the new website to: webmgr@quakedc.gps.caltech.edu .
B. Continuous Data Recording of Significant Earthquakes
As a new data product, the Data Center is archiving and distributing large, continuous windows of high sample-rate data (H__ and E__ channels [i.e., sample rates of 80/100 sps]) around significant events. The data set consists of waveforms from all stations for 6 to 24 hour intervals (depending on the magnitude) before and after major seismic events. For example, for the Dec 22, 2003 M 6.5 San Simeon earthquake, we archived all data from the entire array for 6 hours prior to the event and 12 hours after the event.
More information on this topic is available at http://www.data.scec.org/about/sigeventsshot.html
C. What's new with STP (Seismic Transfer Program)?
Principal user access to the SCEDC archive is via STP (Seismic Transfer Program), through the internet or via a downloadable client for use in client-server architecture. STP is a highly innovative software tool that allows users to search and retrieve parametric and waveform data.
STP Programmatic Interface
We are currently developing a programmatic interface for STP. This means you will be able to write a program which directly draws data from our STP servers (instead of having to get the data manually beforehand). We have a working prototype in C, which we're working on making a little more user-friendly. We hope to eventually have it working in Perl and Java. When it is ready, it will be posted on the new website under the STP section of Research Tools.
SAC2000 STP module
We've already written one useful application with our STP programmatic interface, a SAC2000 external function. This module allows you to pull data directly into SAC memory using standard STP commands. For more info, check out http://www.data.scec.org/STP/sac2000stp.html.
D. Scanning of Analog Seismic Records
The Caltech Seismological Lab has been working on a project to scan the pre-digital analog recordings of major earthquakes recorded in Southern California. These paper/optical records of events have been stored at the Kresge Lab and will be scanned by a contractor. We are scanning 1962 to 1992 records with M>3.5 earthquakes; some significant teleseisms will also be included.
There will be two output formats for the scanned results: a raster image format (TIFF) for archive and distribution purposes, as well as JPEG format for users to quickly preview records before downloading. The SCEDC will archive these records and will make them available through a searchable database and download procedure. We are anticipating 30,000 to 50,000 station-days will be scanned over the course of this project. We expect to start making this data available by mid-2004.
The format of file names (also the label on the records) is as follows:
CI.STN.BAND.COMP.YYYYMMDD.HHMM
Example:
CI.PAS.30-90.N.19690108.1500
The north-south 30-90 record for Pasadena beginning at 1500 UTC on January 8, 1969.
E. Temporary Deployment Data Now Available
The Federation of Digital Seismographic Networks (FDSN) has assigned the network code "ZY" for all portable deployments in Southern California from 1990-2025. Now for the first time, the parametric and waveform data from temporary deployments following the Joshua Tree, Landers and Northridge events is available to users via STP. The addition of this code allows users looking for data from temporary stations to narrow their search by limiting their results to the ZY network.
F. How to unsubscribe from the SCEDC mailing list:
- Go to http://www.data.scec.org/mailman/listinfo/scedc_users.
- Type the email address you received this email at in the field closest to the bottom of the page, next to a button which says "Unsubscribe or edit options."
- Click the "Unsubscribe or edit options" button.
- You may be taken to a page with two buttons "Log in" or "Unsubscribe". I suggest logging in. If you do log in, go to #5.
If you click "Unsubscribe", you will be sent an email message that you must reply to in order to confirm that you want to be off the list. - Find the section entitled "Unsubscribing from Scedc_users". Check the box next to "Yes, I really want to unsubscribe". Click the unsubscribe button.
- You will be taken to a page that will hopefully say that you have been unsubscribed. You will also get an email to tell you that you've been unsubscribed.
- If you have any trouble, email webmgr@quakedc.gps.caltech.edu and make sure to include the email address which you want to unsubscribe.
How to subscribe to the SCEDC mailing list:
If you know anyone who may want to be on this mailing list and currently is not, please forward this email to them. (The names of people already included are at http://www.data.scec.org/mailman/roster/scedc_users).
- Go to http://www.data.scec.org/mailman/listinfo/scedc_users.
- In the section under the heading "Subscribing to Scedc_users", enter your email address and name.
- You will get an email asking you to confirm that you would like to be a member of this mailing list. Reply to it, including the original subject in your reply.
- You will get another email which will tell you that your confirmation succeeded.
