The current state of strong motion monitoring in Switzerland

Abstract

The next generation Swiss Strong Motion Network has recently been funded by the Swiss Government: in the next 8 years the Swiss Seismological Service expects to install 100 new 24-bit broadband freefield stations in predominantly urban locations across the country with realtime, continuous data transmission at high sampling rates. This infrastructure will compliment the existing 30 comparable realtime stations installed over the last 3 years, and replace the original ~70 strong triggered dial-up network installed in the early 1990s. The introduction of these new stations provides an opportunity to reassess how strong motion data is used in Switzerland, for routine network operations, emergency response and scientific purposes. The strong motion data will be acquired in parallel with the existing broadband network, and will be processed together with broadband data for earthquake early warning, triggering and locations, near real time ShakeMaps, and moment tensor inversion. Challenges arise on how to archive and provide this type of data to the scientific and engineering communities. Metadata maintenance needs to parallel efforts for the broadband network. Although permanent online archival of large volumes of data is rapidly becoming more affordable, this size of the new dataset dwarfs the existing broadband data currently being generated. We discuss the optimal strategies to permanently archive the continuous data, both within Switzerland, and via the existing European data infrastructures. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.