Our first service just ended about a month ago, but we're heading back down this week (13-Nov-2016 to 20-Nov-2016) to prepare the stations for the wet season. On the last service run we found out that many of the stations filled their storage faster than expected, probably due to a large number of aftershocks, which leads to difficulties in the compression algorithm and ends up creating bigger data files. So we're going down with compact flash cards with higher capacity in hopes that they will be able to store all the data through the rainy season.
The field team this run is Daniel and Rob from Arizona and Mariah from Lehigh. We'll meet in Quito Sunday night, get prepared at the Instituto Monday morning, and head out to start work on Monday afternoon. Hopefully we can get a station done that first day, but it may be tough if road conditions aren't clear. Then we've planned on the service run taking three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) and then we head back to Quito Friday and fly back to the States on a red-eye Saturday night to Sunday.
Hopefully we'll have some field photos coming up in the next entries this week, but for now, here's a map highlighting the topography of Ecuador with earthquakes from the USGS plotted as black dots and stations in this aftershock deployment plotted as inverted triangles. These stations include stations from the US team, the UK team, and the French team. There's a lot of things we hope will be done with this data, such as improving locations of local earthquakes in Ecuador and helping us better understand the processes involved in active subduction. But, perhaps more importantly, the way seismology catalogs data means that this data will be available to be mined for hopefully decades to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment