Earthquake Monitoring Software

The Earthquake Monitoring group at the SED operates SeisComP3 for seismic network monitoring, data acquisition, automatic and manual event processing, waveform data and earthquake catalogue archival. SeisComP3 was originally developed at GFZ Potsdam, and is currently maintained by GFZ Potsdam and gempa GmbH. The network migrated to SeisComP3 in October, 2012, following a long-term project to customise the previously global approach to earthquake monitoring to a local approach suitable for Switzerland, that included all the pre-existing features used at the SED. More information here.

Software developed in collaboration with GFZ Potsdam and gempa GmbH include Baer picker option in scautopick, Nonlinloc event locator screloc with 3D velocity model , local magnitude Mlh plugin based on horizontal components and Swiss magnitude relationship. These products are now part of the general release in SeisComP3, and documentation / source code can be found on the SeisComP3 webpages. Our modules are open source. All software we develop that is compatible with the SeisComP3 framework is licenced according to the SED Public Licence for SeisComP3 contributions. Open source code for SC3 in general and the SED developed application is available here. Other software developed more recently that is compatible with the SeisComP3 framework are described below.

scwfparam is a SeisComP3 module that rapidly provides automatic peak ground motion values from earthquakes, and provides input for ShakeMaps and the SED Strong-Motion Portal. scwfparam is also now widely used by other networks, and forms the basis of the ORFEUS RRSM.

A set of 3 modules are now part of the SC3 framework that can be used for Early Warning, implementing the magnitude relations of Virtual Seismologist method.

scenvelope generates real-time envelope values for horizontal and vertical acceleration, velocity and displacement from raw acceleration and velocity waveforms. It was implemented to handle the waveform pre-processing necessary for the scvsmag module. It provides in effect continuous real-time streams of PGA, PGV and PGD values which could also be used independently of scvsmag.

scvsmag listens to new origins from SeisComp (currently from scautoloc), and for a given origin it estimates single station magnitudes and a network magnitude based on the Virtual Seismologist envelope attenuation relationship and ground motion amplitude ratios.

scvsmaglog logs the VS magnitude messages received from scvsmag and, once an event has timed out, generates report files. These report files are saved to disk and can also be sent via email. It also implements an ActiveMQ interface which provides the possibility to send messages to the EEWD, see below.

More information here and here.

The EEWD is a client‐side end‐user software capable of supporting alerts generated by the main EEW algorithms used in Europe, starting with the Virtual Seismologist and the PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem (PRESTo). It is open source, and can be downloaded here. More information here.