SCEC Award Number 22102 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title An Accessible and Extensible CyberShake Data Interface
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Philip Maechling University of Southern California
Other Participants Scott Callaghan
SCEC Priorities 4e, 4c, 4a SCEC Groups GM, EEII, CS
Report Due Date 03/15/2023 Date Report Submitted 08/20/2023
Project Abstract
 The CyberShake PSHA computational platform produces a multi-layered suite of hazard data products, used by the community for a broad variety of applications. To improve access to CyberShake ground motion time series, ground motion amplitudes, and metadata, we developed the CyberShake Data Access tool. This open-source Python tool enables users to specify a CyberShake model, select their desired data product (seismograms, intensity measures, event information, or site information), and provide filters (such as event magnitude or intensity measure period) to retrieve the specific data of interest. Documentation, training materials, and a containerized version of the tool were also developed. Importantly, the user is not required to be familiar with database queries or set up authenticated access, reducing barriers to accessing CyberShake data. With this tool, we support access to seismograms, intensity measures, and metadata from the most recent study, CyberShake Study 22.12, which calculated low-frequency and broadband hazard models for Southern California totaling over 70 TB. We expect this tool will increase community usage of the valuable CyberShake dataset, while reducing the amount of technical support required by the SCEC research computing staff.
Intellectual Merit CyberShake datasets have been used by many SCEC research groups over the past 15 years for a variety of applications, such as tall building assessments (Bijelić et al., 2019), earthquake early warning (Böse et al., 2014), and nonergodic models (Meng et al., 2023). The simulated CyberShake datasets provide realistic seismograms for thousands of M7+ events in California, for which there is a paucity of recorded data. The multilayered CyberShake datasets are useful for a variety of applications and research projects that require suites of large-magnitude seismograms. By developing the CyberShake data access tool to simplify the process of accessing CyberShake data, more research groups will be able to access the 20 billion intensity measures and 420 million seismograms produced in the current study, and in previous studies.

Bijelic, Nenad & Lin, Ting & Deierlein, Gregory. (2019). Quantification of the Influence of Deep Basin Effects on Structural Collapse Using SCEC CyberShake Earthquake Ground Motion Simulations. Earthquake Spectra. 35. 1845-1864. https://doi.org/10.1193/080418EQS197M

Böse, Maren, Robert W. Graves, David Gill, Scott Callaghan, Philip J. Maechling (2014) CyberShake-derived ground-motion prediction models for the Los Angeles region with application to earthquake early warning, Geophysical Journal International, Volume 198, Issue 3, September, 2014, Pages 1438–1457, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggu198

Meng, Xiaofeng, Christine Goulet, Kevin Milner, Robert Graves, Scott Callaghan; (2022) Comparison of Nonergodic Ground‐Motion Components from CyberShake and NGA‐West2 Datasets in California. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 2023;; 113 (3): 1152–1175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0120220049
Broader Impacts The CyberShake data access tool opens up CyberShake data analysis to a broader cross-section of researchers, including students and post-docs, while reducing the amount of technical support required from SCEC computing staff. Many of the broad impact research results from CyberShake studies, such as earthquake engineering and early warning research, were produced by external researchers using CyberShake data, rather than from the CyberShake group that performed the studies. The development of training materials and a stand-alone version of the CyberShake data access software further improves the useability of CyberShake results. The CyberShake method has already been extended and applied to other regions, including New Zealand, and Iceland, and the improved access to CyberShake results provided by this software is likely to increase interest in applying the CyberShake method to additional regions.
Exemplary Figure Figure 2: Overview of the CyberShake Data Access Tool showing the command line user interface (top left), the CyberShake database (top right), and the CyberShake data types available to users of the software including hazard maps, seismograms, and metadata (bottom row). (Image Credit: Scott Callaghan)