Systematic monitoring of instrumentation health in high-density broadband seismic networks

Abstract

Background: Broadband seismometer data are essential for the development of seismological studies such as those investigating earthquake sources and the Earth's structure. However, previous studies have revealed that the metadata describing these data can possibly be contaminated by instrumentation response errors that are often difficult to recognize from visual waveform checks. Herein, we report on the development of a systematic method of assessing seismometer conditions when recording ground motions at a period range of 50 to 200 s in observation networks whose station intervals are smaller than 200 km. Findings: The method is based on comparisons between teleseismic surface wave records at a target station and those at multiple surrounding reference stations, from which we calculate three index parameters and evaluate in situ instrumentation conditions, including amplitude and phase responses against input ground motions. In our experiments, we applied the proposed method to F-net broadband seismometers covering the Japanese Islands, where station intervals are approximately 100 km. This allows us, through calculations of the index parameters, to evaluate instrumentation health at each station at least once every 60 days. Using our proposed method, we found that approximately 75% of the evaluated index parameters distributed well around the standard values, and for most examined broadband seismometers, response anomalies are not detected at the period range of 50 to 200 s. However, instrumentation errors, such as gain decrease over the evaluated periods and gradual changes in amplitude and phase frequency responses (sometimes covering several years) were identified at a few stations. Additionally, overdamping errors at the STS-1 seismometers, which experience significant amplitude and phase frequency response variations around the 360-s corner, appear to have been common at several stations. In contrast, STS-2 seismometers appear to have functioned more reliably than STS-1 seismometers. Conclusions: We developed a method to evaluate broadband seismometer instrument conditions by comparing teleseismic surface waves observed at a target station with those at multiple surrounding stations. It is believed that the systematic evaluation of instrumentation health using our method will enhance the operation of seismic networks, and allow researchers to eliminate contaminated data before conducting various data analyses.