SCEC Award Number 17246 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title SCEC Borehole Instrumentation Program
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Jamison Steidl University of California, Santa Barbara
Other Participants Sam Bell (undergraduate)
Ethan Wang (Undergraduate)
SCEC Priorities 4a, 3a, 1d SCEC Groups Seismology, GM, EEII
Report Due Date 06/15/2018 Date Report Submitted 11/14/2018
Project Abstract
 The SCEC borehole program continues to be a collaborative effort between SCEC and other agen-cies to maintain the existing network of borehole stations in California, to facilitate the integration of this data into CISN and the Southern California Earthquake data center (SCEDC), and to improve the dissemination of borehole data. The borehole program is highly leveraged, taking advantage of the resources of other programs and agencies that are active in monitoring southern California earthquake activity. This data is made available online to the public and research community, both through the SCEDC and the UCSB data portal. Organizations the SCEC borehole instrumentation program collaborates with include Caltech, ANSS, NSMP, and the California Geological Survey. Other collaborators include the UC San Diego HPWREN program, the NSF EarthScope program at UNAVCO, and the UCSD Anza Network. In 2018, the SCEC borehole program began a new collab-oration with Pacific Gas and Electric, in support of the UCSB Geotechnical Array Monitoring Project, previously funded by the NRC, and the NSF NEES program. The Geotechnical Array support from PG&E provides partial funding for the real-time continuous monitoring operations, data processing and analysis software, and the UCSB web-based data dissemination portal, all important leveraged components of the SCEC borehole program. This past year we have integrated the USGS PRISM processing engine into the data dissemination portal so users can download processed strong mo-tion records in addition to the raw data.
Intellectual Merit The borehole instrumentation program contributes to SCEC goals in a number of ways. While funded primarily as a data gathering effort, the data is useful for locating regional seismicity, and improving our understanding of crustal structure and imaging faults. Data from the borehole sensors can also provide better estimates of earthquake source properties as this data is less contaminated by the effects of the near-surface soft soil conditions. The downhole and surface data combined is also important for understanding both the linear and non-linear response of near-surface geology. They provide the baseline low-strain data, as well as more important yet less frequent large strain case histories for the study of nonlinearity. These stations are helping GMPE modelers to understand the component of uncertainty in ground motion prediction that is related to the site effect.
Broader Impacts Undergraduate and graduate students have always been, and continue to be used in the borehole instrumentation program for both fieldwork, and data analysis and more recently data dissemination through integration with the NEES@UCSB data portal. Matching funds from UCSB augment the funds provided from SCEC to support the students on this project. These students are getting hands-on experience with instrumentation and data processing and analysis techniques, a unique aspect of their education and training as the next generation seismologist and geophysicist.
Exemplary Figure Figure 2. The USGS Processing and Review Interface for Strong Motion Data (PRISM) has now been integrated into the web-based data dissemination portal allowing users to download both raw and processed data.