The GEOFON Program in 2020

Javier Quinteros,Rainer Kind,Susanne Hemmleb,Joachim Saul,Peter L Evans,Thomas Zieke,Andres Heinloo,Winfried Hanka,Laura Hillmann,Karl-Heinz Jaeckel,Frederik Tilmann,Angelo Strollo

doi:10.1785/0220200415

Abstract

Abstract The GEOFON program consists of a global seismic network, a seismological data center, and a global earthquake monitoring system. The seismic network has regional focus in Europe and North Africa as well as throughout the Indian Ocean, but it operates stations on all continents, including Greenland on the North American continental plate and Antarctica. The data center provides real-time seismic data through the SeedLink protocol and historical data from its large archive that currently comprises 120 TB of temporary and permanent seismic network data from GeoForschungsZentrums and third-party partners made available via standard services as part of the European Integrated Data Archive and within the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks. GEOFON also provides global and rapid earthquake information. The rapid earthquake information service prioritizes fast information dissemination globally after moderate and large earthquakes based on automatic processing. Most operations are carried out using the SeisComP system. GEOFON distributes findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data, services, products, and software free of charge, and it is used worldwide by hundreds of users and other data centers.

Highlights

Introduction and historical overviewFor almost three decades the GEOFON program at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam has operated both a global seismic network and a seismological data center
Within the sections we present the three main GEOFON components, namely, the global seismic network, the data center, and the Rapid Earthquake Monitoring System as well as some relevant software developments
To foster report publications, which is a requirement for Geophysical Instrument Pool Potsdam (GIPP) users, we developed a convenient online tool called Report Generator, providing different templates and automated procedures to create most of the standard content required in dataset reports such as station distribution maps, station tables, and collections of PPSD plots from the availabledata

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and historical overviewFor almost three decades the GEOFON program at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam (see Data and Resources) has operated both a global seismic network and a seismological data center. The development and community adoption of the SeedLink protocol (see Data and Resources) in the late 1990s, which became a global de facto standard still in use today, allowed the real-time distribution of data between networks and data centers. Within the sections we present the three main GEOFON components, namely, the global seismic network, the data center, and the Rapid Earthquake Monitoring System as well as some relevant software developments.

Results

Conclusion