SCEC Award Number 17089 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) 2017 Operations
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Robert Clayton California Institute of Technology
Other Participants Ellen Yu, Data Center Manager
SCEC Priorities 1d, 2b, 3g SCEC Groups Seismology
Report Due Date 06/15/2018 Date Report Submitted 06/25/2018
Project Abstract
 Currently the SCEDC archives continuous and triggered data from nearly 11968 data channels from 557 SCSN recorded stations. On average, the SCEDC archives data from 16,000 earth-quakes each year. SCSN/SCEDC operations generate products such as event catalogs, wave-form archives, moment tensor solutions, ShakeMaps, and Recent Earthquake Maps. These products are vital to emergency response and earthquake research. Advances in information technology and earth science research have produced intriguing possibilities for the future of seismic data archival. With the advent of real-time GPS, the seismological research community is able to view a new bandwidth of data. Cloud computing will change how computational resources are managed.
The Southern California Earthquake Data Center is leading efforts in exploring how these developments can further its core mission of archival and distribution of seismic data and products for earthquake research.
Intellectual Merit The Data Center is a central resource of SCEC and continues to be an integral part of the Center. In 2017, the SCEDC continued to contribute to the SCEC scientific community by providing online access to a stable and permanent archive of seismic waveforms and earthquake parametric data. The seismological data archive held at the SCEDC has contributed significantly to the publication of many scientific papers pertinent to the region, most of which have SCEC publication numbers. The Caltech/USGS catalog archived by the SCEDC is the most complete archive of seismic data for any region in the United States.
Broader Impacts The SCEDC has allowed the data to be distributed to a much broader community of scientists, engineers, technologists, and educators than was previously feasible. The electronic distribution of data allows researchers in the world-wide scientific community to analyze the seismic data collected and archived in southern California and contribute their results to the SCEC community.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1. Data volumes stored at the SCEDC for seismological research.