Operations and Organization of the Mobile Finnish Seismic Instrument Pool FINNSIP

We report on the operations and organizational structure of the mobile Finnish seismic instrument pool FINNSIP (https://finnsip.fi) that is jointly owned and operated by five Finnish academic and research institutions. The pool infrastructure was funded by the Research Council of Finland through the FLEX-EPOS project under the FIN-EPOS umbrella. Funding supported the build-up phase from 2021 to 2024, after which the pool continues operating as a national research infrastructure.

The seismic instrumentation includes 46 Güralp broadband seismometers, 4 Güralp accelerometers, 1166 Geospace three-component short-period geophones-digitizers pairs, 71 SmartSolo self-contained three-component short-period geophone units, and 50 Geospace digitizers with cellular connection. This makes it probably the largest coherent mobile seismic instrument pool in Europe in the public sector. Instrument pools, when coupled with efficient data storage and transmission and powerful computing resources, provide strong support for research activities of various institutions. The mobile Finnish seismic instrument pool actively engages with ORFEUS/EIDA and the Geo-INQUIRE project, contributing to the development of community solutions for data discovery and accessibility. Nevertheless, even in developed countries, it remains challenging for a single institution to acquire and maintain a sufficiently large mobile pool of instruments and ensure sustainable data production and distribution. Here we report on the pool’s governance structure, project management, and the challenges encountered in the daily operations. We discuss example of domestic and international collaborative projects of temporary deployments to enhance data-driven subsurface and environmental applications. We report statistics of deployments for active or passive experiments that can range from a few days up to a few years. Over the past 5 years, the pool has supported more than 40 projects and generated more than 110 TB of raw and curated data. Short-period sensors are used in most projects, and a quarter involves deployments of more than 500 nodes, highlighting the demand and interest in large-number nodal deployments.