Standing Committee Meeting Report Transportable Array Advisory Committee

August 2015

Transportable Array Advisory Committee Meeting

August 2015

Virtual Teleconference

Action Items:

1. TAAC: In light of UAF being named EarthScope National Office and Jeff Freymueller's significant role in that activity, the TAAC is requested to nominate a new chair for Board approval and to seat the chair by early 2016. 

Recommendations:

1. The USGS Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) and its staff at University of Alaska Fairbanks expressed concern about plans that might curtail telemetry of infrasound data from Transportable Array station in Alaska due to budget constraints-data was expected to be recorded locally. They described their interest and the utility of infrasound data for their work in Volcano monitoring. The TA Advisory Committee (TA AC) requested information from the TA manager about the instrumentation available and the associated costs for operation / data telemetry as well as the geographic distribution of the planned deployment. The TA budget, equipment and contracted Data Plan allow us to send 2Gb/mo from each station. The atmospheric pressure data transmitted in the Lower48 includes BDO and BDF channels at 40 sps and LDF and LDO channels at 1 sps. The bandwidth for this data varies widely between stations, ranging from 300 to 700Mb per month. A compromise was reached to support data telemetry of BDF at 20 sps, LDF and LDO at 1 sps which is expected to limit this data to about 300 Mb / month per station, again with wide variation, but less likely to exceed data plan allowance and no impact to current seismic uses. In some stations the committee may recommend to send Strong Motion data rather than BDF if throughput does not allow both. The number and geographic distribution of strong motion sensors was deferred for a later recommendation. During the discussion the committee noted the AVO data is not available publicly and recommends that AVO seek to make their infrasound data from about 80 stations publicly available for open access, perhaps at the IRIS DMC. The IRIS Data Services Standing Committee shall be notified of this recommendation.