A Science and Archive Ready Digital Data Recording System for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research

The 2008 IRIS Community publication " Seismological Grand Challenges in Understanding Earth's Dynamic Systems" described societal environmental challenges that seismology can address but noted that an interdisciplinary approach was needed to fully take advantage of seismology's significant contribution. The choices back in 2008 were stark for researchers wanting low powered simple digital scientific grade records of analog signals, either an expensive and large broadband seismic recorder requiring more power and logistics or go the other route and find or make an inexpensive recorder with not well-defined timing, gain, response, reliability or support. The newest Nanometrics digitizer, the Pegasus and its ecosystem, is designed for optimum SWaP (size, weight and power) while still low noise enough to be used with observatory grade seismic sensors. The Pegasus (.2 watts) can be coupled with low power sensors such as a Trillium Compact Horizon (.18 watts) to create a node size broadband system, that requires under .4 watts, that is easily transportable (< 1.75kg) and creates standard miniseed archive ready data sets and complete station XML. Important for scientists new to seismology standards where science programs require a proposal data plan and easily shared archived data that can leverage all the time series tools. These lightweight and environmentally rugged types of systems are ideal for deploying in remote environments with enough data storage for recording continuously up to three years at 100sps. The Pegasus digitizers have both four 24 bit channels and three 16 bit SOH channels and are rated for both very wet and polar environments. With a wide range of sample rates and gains for integrating with many types of analog sensors it is a system capable of supporting a multidisciplinary approach in the field and has some of the best attributes of an oil and gas type node but with much more capability. Downloading is via USB3 to either a ruggedized solid state drive or laptop at a data rate of ~1 month every 10 seconds for standard broadband seismic recording rates. These systems are easily reconfigured in the field as required with the Pegasus phone application and if part of a larger network there is a campaign manager application available to keep configurations recorded and verified or can be used for planning an experiment.