Caltech/USGS Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN): Infrastructure upgrade to support Earthquake Early Warning (EEW)

The SCSN is the modern digital ground motion seismic network in Southern California and performs the following tasks: 1) Operates remote seismic stations and the central data processing systems in Pasadena; 2) Generates and reports real-time products including location, magnitude, ShakeMap, aftershock probabilities and others; 3) Responds to FEMA, CalOES, media, and public inquiries about earthquakes; 4) Manages the production, archival, and distribution of waveforms, phase picks, and other data at the SCEDC; 5) Contributes to development and implementation of the demonstration EEW system called CISN ShakeAlert. Initially, the ShakeAlert project was funded through the US Geological Survey (USGS) and in early 2012, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation provided three years of new funding for EEW research and development for the US west coast. Recently, we have also received some Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) funding to enhance the EEW capabilities for the local UASI region by making our system overall faster, more reliable and redundant than the existing system. The additional and upgraded stations will be capable of decreasing latency and ensuring data delivery by using more reliable and redundant telemetry pathways. Overall, this will enhance the reliability of the earthquake early warnings by providing denser station coverage and more resilient data centers than before. * Seismic Datalogger upgrade: replaces existing dataloggers with modern equipment capable of sending one-second uncompressed packets and utilizing redundant Ethernet telemetry. * GPS upgrade: replaces the existing GPS receivers and antennas, especially at "zipper array" sites near the major faults, with receivers that perform on-board precise point positioning to calculate position and velocity in real time and stream continuous data for use in EEW calculations. * New co-located seismic/GPS stations: increases station density and reduces early warning delays that are incurred by travel time of the seismic waves to the nearest station and will increase the reliability of the early warning with multiple measurements from more than one reporting station. * New server hardware: will allow for separate software development, testing/integration of algorithms and production systems capable of testing with current as well as playback of historical data. Also the new systems will be used to develop and test new EEW algorithms like slip detection (GPSlip) and Finite-Fault Rupture Detection (FinDer). * Standardization and Security: the new systems will allow us to standardize on hardware installation and configuration procedures. It will also enable us to implement the latest computer and network security measures to secure the data and internal processing from malicious threats. * System architecture: the new hardware will allow us to port existing EEW algorithms from Solaris to Linux. The new equipment will also allow us to experiment with different system architecture configurations like redundant servers with fail-over capabilities for the production EEW system. When installed the new and upgraded seismic dataloggers and GPS stations as well as the new server hardware will greatly improve the EEW capabilities of the SCSN network and the CISN ShakeAlert system in general providing more resilience, robustness and redundancy in the system.