European Plate Observing System Research Articles

RÉSIF-SI: A Distributed Information System for French Seismological Data

AbstractThe Résif project, which started in 2008, aims at gathering under a common research infrastructure the French seismological, Global Navigation Satellite Systems and gravimeter permanent networks, as well as the mobile instrument pools. A central part of Résif is its seismological information system, Système d'Information de Résif (Résif-SI) (started in 2012), which is in charge of collecting, validating, archiving, and distributing seismological data and metadata from seven national centers. Résif-SI follows a distributed architecture, in which the six data collection and validation centers (A-nodes) send validated data and metadata to a national data center (Résif Data Center [Résif-DC]), which is the central point for data archiving and distribution. Résif-SI is based on international standard formats and protocols, and is fully integrated into European and international data exchange systems (European Integrated Data Archive, European Plate Observing System [EPOS], Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks). In this article, we present the organization of Résif-SI, the technical details of its implementation, and the catalog of services provided to the end users. The article is aimed both at seismologists, who want to discover and use Résif data, and at data center operators, who might be interested in the technical choices made in the implementation of Résif-SI. We believe that Résif-SI can be a model for other countries facing the problem of integrating different organizations into a centralized seismological information system.

Integrating Data under the European Plate Observing System from the Regional and Selected Local Seismic Networks in Poland

AbstractHigh-quality and open-access seismic data are of great importance for both research and increasing public awareness of actual seismic hazards and risks. We present four seismic networks that currently operate in Poland: the backbone Polish Seismological Network (PLSN), which monitors natural teleseismic events as well as regional events from Poland, and three networks that mainly serve the monitoring of anthropogenic seismicity. The acquired data from all four networks are openly available through the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Information Technology (IT) facilities: the PLSN data within the Observatories and Research Facilities for European Seismology–European Integrated Data Archive and the anthropogenic seismicity data episodes through the induced seismicity-EPOS platform of EPOS Thematic Core Service Anthropogenic Hazards. For each network, we describe briefly the recorded seismic activity, the equipment and composition of the network, the acquisition system, and the data availability. Information from recent studies is used to demonstrate the scientific potential of the acquired anthropogenic seismicity data.

Land Surface Subsidence Due to Mining-Induced Tremors in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin (Poland)—Case Study

Seismic phenomena threaten land-based buildings, structures, and infrastructure and can transform land topography. There are two basic types of seismic phenomena, namely, tectonic and anthropogenic, which differ mainly in epicenter depth, surface impact range, and magnitude (energy). This article shows how a land surface was changed by a series of seven rock mass tremors of magnitude ML = 2.3–2.6 in March–May 2017. Their immediate cause was the “momentary” acceleration of void clamping, which was activated by local and short-term seismic phenomena caused by human activity. The induced seismic events resulted from the geological structure of the rock mass, which in the specific region of examination was classified as being highly prone to mining tremors. The authors focused on describing vertical surface displacements in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin in the south of Poland. The surface deformations were identified using DInSAR technology, which allows quasi-continuous monitoring of large areas of land surface. The present research used freely available data from the Copernicus Program and seismic data from the European Plate Observing System.

A Global Archive of Coseismic DInSAR Products Obtained Through Unsupervised Sentinel-1 Data Processing

We present an automatic and unsupervised tool for the systematic generation of Sentinel-1 (S1) differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) coseismic products. In particular, the tool first retrieves the location, depth, and magnitude of every seismic event from interoperable online earthquake catalogs (e.g., the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and then, for significant (with respect to a set of selected thresholds) earthquakes, it automatically triggers the downloading of S1 data and their interferometric processing over the area affected by the earthquake. The automatic system we developed has also been implemented within a Cloud-Computing (CC) environment, specifically the Amazon Web Services, with the aim of creating a global database of DInSAR S1 coseismic products, which consist of displacement maps and the associated wrapped interferograms and spatial coherences. This information will progressively be made freely available through the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Research Infrastructure, thus providing the scientific community with a large catalog of DInSAR data that can be helpful for investigating the dynamics of surface deformation in the seismic zones around the Earth. The developed tool can also support national and local authorities during seismic crises by quickly providing information on the surface deformation induced by earthquakes.

Ultra-fast near real-time estimation of troposphere parameters and coordinates from GPS data

Abstract The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) integrates existing and newly created research infrastructures for earth sciences in Europe. One of the tasks of the EPOS project is developing a service to monitor GPS station coordinates and the troposphere in ultra-fast near real-time (NRT UF) system, the latter of which is discussed in this paper. Currently, NRT standard processing is based on one hour processing. However, the availability of real-time products from the International GNSS Service allows the latency to be reduced. This paper shows the results of 15-minute processing in comparison to the daily post-processing, weekly combined EUREF Permanent Network solution and radiosonde data. The obtained RMS error of the Helmert transformation of the coordinates is on the order of 2.2mm. The retrieval quality of troposphere parameters is similar to that of the standard NRT system, achieving an RMS error of 5mm with respect to the external data sources.

SHAPE: A MATLAB Software Package for Time-Dependent Seismic Hazard Analysis

AbstractMany seismic processes, in particular, those induced by technological activities for exploitation of georesources, are time dependent. The changes in time of the seismicity cause that the related seismic hazard changes in time as well. We present here the Seismic HAzard Parameters Evaluation (SHAPE) tool, which enables an assessment of the temporal changes of the mean return period (MRP) of a seismic event of a given magnitude and the exceedance probability (EP) of a given magnitude within a predefined time period. SHAPE is an open-source software package, written in MATLAB (see Data and Resources), based on the online probabilistic seismic hazard analysis applications available on IS-EPOS platform of thematic core service anthropogenic hazards of European Plate Observing System (EPOS). SHAPE is developed in two standalone versions allowing the user to select a variety of options and parameters to determine the values of EP and MRP, assuming different magnitude distribution models. The first software version (SHAPE_ver1) provides interactive parameter selection and data filtering through a graphical user interface environment, whereas the second wrapper-script-based version (SHAPE_ver2) allows fast implementation and fine-tuning of parameters. The program is particularly useful for anthropogenic seismicity cases, to monitor the changes of seismic response to technological operations, and to control the effectiveness of the undertaken hazard mitigation measures. As an example, two applications of SHAPE in case studies from the northwestern part of The Geysers geothermal field, California, and Song Tranh 2 surface water reservoir, Vietnam, are demonstrated.

Wahania zwierciadła wód podziemnych pod wpływem wstrząsów górniczych w obszarze górniczym kopalni Rydułtowy

Groundwater level changes caused by influence of mining tremors – case study from the Rydu³towy Mine Area (Poland). A b s t r a c t. In 2018, as part of the implementation of a European project: European Plate Observing System (EPOS-PL), a hydrological monitoring system was installed in a Rybnik test site. The system is configured to measure changes of groundwater level caused by seismic events which were induced by mining exploitation. The piezometers were drilled within an active mining area, in close vicinity to mining longwalls of the Rydultowy Coal Mine, an industrial partner in the project. The paper presents the state of knowledge on the phenomena of co-seismicity in hydrology, a description of installed measuring system, and the first hydrographs registered for mining tremors with a local magnitude from 2.7 to 3.1, which occurred up to 3 km away from the location of piezometers.

An open data infrastructure for the study of anthropogenic hazards linked to georesource exploitation

Mining, water-reservoir impoundment, underground gas storage, geothermal energy exploitation and hydrocarbon extraction have the potential to cause rock deformation and earthquakes, which may be hazardous for people, infrastructure and the environment. Restricted access to data constitutes a barrier to assessing and mitigating the associated hazards. Thematic Core Service Anthropogenic Hazards (TCS AH) of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) provides a novel e-research infrastructure. The core of this infrastructure, the IS-EPOS Platform (tcs.ah-epos.eu) connected to international data storage nodes offers open access to large grouped datasets (here termed episodes), comprising geoscientific and associated data from industrial activity along with a large set of embedded applications for their efficient data processing, analysis and visualization. The novel team-working features of the IS-EPOS Platform facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary scientific research, public understanding of science, citizen science applications, knowledge dissemination, data-informed policy-making and the teaching of anthropogenic hazards related to georesource exploitation. TCS AH is one of 10 thematic core services forming EPOS, a solid earth science European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) (www.epos-ip.org).

Making Linked Data more reliable with a failover server system: a case study with seismological data at INGV.

Since the introduction of the Linked Data concept more than a decade ago, today the way scientists use and share their research data is increasingly changing. The growing availability of big amounts of Open Research Data is challenging the old-fashioned habit of replicating large datasets locally prior to their processing, and the new Open Science paradigm tries to update the way researchers works by pushing them into solutions enabling a quicker, lightweight and more efficient circulation of research results. Granting access to its data resources is an activity taken very seriously at INGV, moreover as it is head of two important European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), namely the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory (EMSO), and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS). As more and more data are becoming accessible via web services, an increasing number of researchers are starting to include their use in their workflows, thus, heavily relying on their correct and continuous operational functioning, in other words, in their service continuity. Experimenting solutions for enhancing the reliability of web services is at the core of the present work. We propose here a solution that is able to guarantee the functioning of a service in case of an IT infrastructure fail, a mechanism that is able to automatically switch to a secondary server located in another network. The solution is made possible thanks to a collaboration with GARR, the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Public Italian Research, and is able to deal with network problems, server hardware problems, as well as service level problems.

The pan-European Engineering Strong Motion (ESM) flatfile: compilation criteria and data statistics

The Engineering Strong-Motion (ESM) flatfile is a parametric table which contains verified and reliable metadata and intensity measures of manually processed waveforms included in the ESM database. The flatfile has been developed within the Seismology Thematic Core Service of EPOS-IP (European Plate Observing System Implementation Phase) and it is disseminated throughout a web portal ( http://esm.mi.ingv.it/flatfile-2018/flatfile.php ) for research and technical purposes. The adopted criteria for flatfile compilation aim to collect strong motion data and related metadata in a uniform, updated, traceable and quality-checked way to develop Ground Motion Models (GMMs) for Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) and engineering applications. In this paper, we present the characteristics of ESM flatfile in terms of recording, event and station distributions, and we discuss the most relevant features of the Intensity Measures (IMs) of engineering interest included in the table. The dataset for flatfile compilation includes 23,014 recordings from 2179 earthquakes and 2080 stations from Europe and Middle-East. The events are characterized by magnitudes in the range 3.5–8.0 and refer to different tectonics regimes, such as shallow active crustal and subduction zones. Intensity measures include peak and integral parameters and duration of each waveform. The spectral amplitudes of the (5% damping) acceleration and displacement response are provided for 36 periods, in the interval 0.01–10 s, as well as the 103 amplitudes of the Fourier spectrum for the frequency range 0.04–50 Hz. Several statistics are shown with reference to the most significant metadata for GMMs calibrations, such as moment magnitude, focal depth, several distance metrics, style of faulting and parameters for site characterization. Furthermore, we also compare and explain the most relevant differences between the metadata of ESM flatfile with those provided by the previous flatfile derived in RESORCE (Reference Database for Seismic Ground Motion in Europe) project.

Establishing Core Concepts for Information-Powered Collaborations

Science benefits tremendously from mutual exchanges of information and pooling of effort and resources. The combination of different skills and diverse knowledge is a powerful capacity, source of new intuitions and creative insights. Therefore multidisciplinary approaches can be a great opportunity to explore novel scientific horizons. Collaboration is not only an opportunity, it is essential when tackling today’s global challenges by exploiting our fast growing wealth of data. In this paper we introduce the concept of Information-Powered Collaborations (IPC) — an abstraction that captures those requirements and opportunities. We propose a conceptual framework that partitions the inherent complexity of such dynamic environments and offers concrete tools and methods to thrive in the data revolution era. Such a framework promotes and enables information sharing from multiple heterogeneous sources that are independently managed. We present the results of assessing our approach as an IPC for solid-Earth sciences: the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).

Automatic generation of co-seismic displacement maps by using Sentinel-1 interferometric SAR data

We present a tool for the automatic generation of co-seismic Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) products by using space-borne SAR data. In particular, the implemented tool relies on the large availability of Sentinel-1 SAR data and on-line earthquake catalogues (e.g. USGS, INGV) to generate co-seismic Line Of Sight (LOS) interferograms and displacement maps. The processing is triggered by the occurrence of a main seismic event, according to the accessible earthquake catalogues. The tool automatically retrieves all the needed SAR acquisitions that cover a defined area across the epicentre and generates the DInSAR products that will be then openly available through the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) portal. Moreover, the possibility to implement the presented tool into the upcoming Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS) will significantly reduce the product processing time, thus implying a faster product generation and delivery. Accordingly, such a tool not only will contribute to expand the use of DInSAR products in the geoscience field, but also will play a key role on the support of the Civil Protection authorities during the management of seismic crisis.

Seismic observations at the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory: history, present, and the future

Abstract. Instrumental seismic observations in northern Finland started in the 1950s. They were originally initiated by the Institute of Seismology of the University of Helsinki (ISUH), but the staff of Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and later geophysicists of the University of Oulu (UO) were involved in the development of seismological observations and research in northern Finland from the very beginning. This close cooperation between seismologists and the technical staff of ISUH, UO, and SGO continued in many significant international projects and enabled a high level of seismological research in Finland. In our paper, we present history and current status of seismic observations and seismological research in northern Finland at the UO and SGO. These include both seismic observations at permanent seismic stations and temporary seismic experiments with portable seismic equipment. We describe the present seismic instrumentation and major research topics of the seismic group at SGO and discuss plans for future development of permanent seismological observations and portable seismic instrumentation at SGO as part of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure. We also present the research topics of the recently organized Laboratory of Applied Seismology, and show examples of seismic observations performed by new seismic equipment located at this laboratory and selected results of time-lapse seismic body wave travel-time tomography using the data of microseismic monitoring in the Pyhäsalmi Mine (northern Finland).

The European Plate Observing System and the Arctic

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) aims to integrate existing infrastructures in the solid earth sciences into a single infrastructure, enabling earth scientists across Europe to combine, model, and interpret multidisciplinary datasets at different time and length scales. In particular, a primary objective is to integrate existing research infrastructures within the fields of seismology, geodesy, geophysics, geology, rock physics, and volcanology at a pan-European level. The added value of such integration is not visible through individual analyses of data from each research infrastructure; it needs to be understood in a long-term perspective that includes the time when changes implied by current scientific research results are fully realized and their societal impacts have become clear. EPOS is now entering its implementation phase following a four-year preparatory phase during which 18 member countries in Europe contributed more than 250 research infrastructures to the building of this pan-European vision. The Arctic covers a significant portion of the European plate and therefore plays an important part in research on the solid earth in Europe. However, the work environment in the Arctic is challenging. First, most of the European Plate boundary in the Arctic is offshore, and hence, sub-sea networks must be built for solid earth observation. Second, ice covers the Arctic Ocean where the European Plate boundary crosses through the Gakkel Ridge, so innovative technologies are needed to monitor solid earth deformation. Therefore, research collaboration with other disciplines such as physical oceanography, marine acoustics, and geo-biology is necessary. The establishment of efficient research infrastructures suitable for these challenging conditions is essential both to reduce costs and to stimulate multidisciplinary research.

Using the Nordic Geodetic Observing System for land uplift studies

Abstract. Geodetic observing systems have been planned and developed during the last decade. An ideal observing system consists of a network of geodetic observing stations with several techniques at the same site, publicly accessible databases, and as a product delivers data time series, combination of techniques or some other results obtained from the data sets. Globally, there is the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS), and there are ongoing attempts to create also regional observing systems. In this paper we introduce one regional system, the Nordic Geodetic Observing System (NGOS) hosted by the Nordic Geodetic Commission (NKG). Data availability and accessibility are one of the major issues today. We discuss in general data-related topics, and introduce a pilot database project of NGOS. As a demonstration of the use of such a database, we apply it for postglacial rebound studies in the Fennoscandian area. We compare land uplift values from three techniques, GNSS, tide gauges and absolute gravity, with the Nordic Geodetic Commission NKG2005LU land uplift model for Fennoscandia. The purpose is to evaluate the data obtained from different techniques and different sources and get the most reliable values for the uplift using publicly available data. The primary aim of observing systems will be to produce data and other products needed by multidisciplinary projects, such as Upper Mantle Dynamics and Quaternary Climate in Cratonic Areas (DynaQlim) or the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), but their needs may currently exceed the scope of an existing observing system. We discuss what requirements the projects pose to observing systems and their development. To make comparisons between different studies possible and reliable, the researcher should document what they have in detail, either in appendixes, supplementary material or some other available format.