Multidisciplinary Stations: A Next Generation Tool Kit for Geoscience

As cross-disciplinary science becomes increasingly critical to understanding geophysical phenomena, a multidisciplinary approach is essential for integrating instrumentation and ensuring reliable and efficient data acquisition for successful scientific outcomes.

The scientific community requires adaptable solutions for the co-location of diverse sensor types. Deploying such instruments in remote, volatile environments while ensuring reliable, continuous data acquisition presents additional challenges. The complexity and cost associated with deploying, operating and maintaining remote stations are significantly increased if using multiple independent sensors, each with dedicated acquisition infrastructure. Recent efforts, such as the European Plate Observing System, aim to address this by integrating multidisciplinary geophysical applications into unified and efficient deployments.

Modern seismic data loggers, such as the Nanometrics Centaur Gen5, support integration of a wide range of sensing elements, while maintaining ultra-low power consumption, precise timing, local data storage and reliable real-time data transmission. Enhanced capabilities regarding customization and edge computing allow the implementation of functionality tailored to meet specific monitoring objectives for unique station configurations.

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