Standing Committee Meeting Report PASSCAL

October 2002

Action Items from PASSCAL Standing Committee Meeting

Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Adelphi, MD

Members Present: Roy Johnson, Geoff Abers, John Collins, Joan Gomberg, David James, John Louie, Kurt Marfurt and Steve Roecker

Others Present: Marcos Alvarez, Steve Harder, Frank Vernon, Jim Fowler

            Action Item:
           
Minutes of 3/11/02 meeting approved unanimously.

Review of Policy for the Use of PASSCAL Instruments

DOE has agreed to allow all instruments to be pooled and give DOE equal priority as NSF experiments. This new policy resulted after lots of negotiations, and DOE has agreed to remove almost all restrictions.

Action Item:
The new Policy document was approved unanimously.

DOE Budget

J. Fowler wants to wait for test results from D. Kromer before ordering QC330s and Reftek 130s. A preliminary budget has been given to DOE (what he circulated to the Standing Committee). J. Fowler says the PIC staff will evaluate both DAS and present their choice and rationale for it to the Committee.

Action Item:
A final budget will be presented to the Committee for approval within a few weeks.

Additional Administrator at PIC

J. Fowler says they really need another junior level admin person. Would like to do so before next proposal cycle, but could use extra money to hire this person sooner, in Jan. or Feb. Cost is ~$40K/year including overhead.

Action Item:
Committee approval for this was granted unanimously.

Instrumentation Research and Development

IRIS should pursue opportunities to develop additional external funds in order to proactively influence technological developments that benefit seismology.

Action Items:

  • Keep informed of developments in instrumentation.
    • Updates from instrumentation committee
    • PASSCAL discussions
    • Community experience
    • International opportunities
  • Pursue targets of opportunity.
    • Encourage promising prototype developments with seed funds
    • Partner in evaluation of instruments
  • Encourage initiatives to develop next few generations of instrumentation.
  • Encourage technology development at academic levels that has the potential to lead to new instrumentation.
  • Continue to support efforts to improve data recovery and data quality (e.g., from 10% to 1% accuracy) through improvements in deployment technologies.
  • Monitor and take advantage of developments in alternative power options.

RAMP

In order to better support some of the DOE requirements to record shots with 20-25 instruments with short notice it is necessary to expand RAMP pool. These instruments will also be available for earthquake aftershock experiments.

Action Item:
Committee agrees unanimously to expand RAMP pool as requested.