Next Generation Multidisciplinary Geophysical Monitoring Station

Increasingly, scientific advancement is enabled via the joint analysis and interpretation of multidisciplinary datasets which combine different data types from various co-located, independent geophysical sensing elements. Historically, sensors from different disciplines, and their supporting subsystems, have evolved independently. This often led to duplication of infrastructure and integration challenges associated with separate acquisition systems, with different characteristics and capabilities, attempting to share bandwidth-constrained communications links between remote stations and data centers. These factors can significantly increase monitoring station complexity and the associated cost to deploy, operate and maintain them. Recent initiatives, such as the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), the amalgamation of the SAGE and GAGE programs in the United States and the SZ4D implementation plan, aim to combine multidisciplinary geophysical applications into cohesive, streamlined deployments.

Modern seismic dataloggers, such as the Nanometrics Centaur, support integration of a wide range of sensing elements using various interfaces, while maintaining ultra-low power consumption, precise timing, local data storage and reliable real-time data transmission via a full-featured protocol, which can be optimized for different telemetry path constraints. Robust automatic outage recovery ensures maximum data availability at the data center, for all data types, as part of a single, unified acquisition system.

A case study is presented for a multidisciplinary monitoring station that leverages these capabilities to enable reliable and efficient data acquisition. The station design and end-to-end data pipeline, from remote sensing to science doorstep in the data center, are discussed.