Waveform Data

AusPass primarily hosts data collected by ANU researchers but also experiments conducted via ANSIR equipment loans, as well as other datasets from people who simply asked us to host their data. We also host some networks from external agencies and non-ANSIR projects. For an updated list, see the table on the main AusPass webpage or feel free to search our stations via FDSN.

Hosting Your Data With Us

If you are interested in hosting your seismic data with us, please get in touch! Chances are we would be more than happy to oblige, but keep in mind that we also require metadata in stationXML OR text metadata in the appropriate formatwhich we can then use to build stationXML for you.

External Network data

We host some (a lot, but not all!) complimentary data from the Global Seismograph Network (GSN - IU), mainly NWAO, MBWA, and CTAO.

We also archive live streams from the Seismology Research Centre (OZ) as well as the University of Melbourne (VW).

QA/QC

Where possible, we will fix obvious timing errors such as constant time offsets and clock drifts and host the "fixed" version of the waveform data. Sometimes timing corrections cannot be reliably fixed (e.g. clocks jumping around too much intraday) and they are left as-is. Other times, issues were missed or could not be perfectly fixed. If you find any discrepancies, kindly just let us know when and where.

We do not fix north azimuth misalignments with the exception of perfectly inverted N-S alignments, which are extremely rare.

We keep copies of the original raw data as well as a folder of timing corrections and are happy to facilitate access to these upon request. If you see any issues, please let us know.

Station Data

For all of the networks and stations in our waveform archive, we also host the accompanying STATION metadata (which includes response information). For networks outside of our control (e.g. AU and IU) we download this metadata from IRIS/Earthscope. Any issues with this data should be directed at the respective agencies in charge of keeping it accurate.

Response information, particularly for older stations when records were not usually kept very well, might be wrong! Sometimes we just have to take a guess and eyeball appropriate gain values via expected PSD amplitudes. In practice even if the gain is off by 2-4x, the affect on resulting earthquake magnitude estimates are lower than the natural degree of scatter in estimates from station to station.  

Earthquake Data

We host copies of Geoscience Australia's global earthquake catalog which is derived exclusively from the output of the Earthquakes@GA web portal. We do this by manually downloading CSV data and converting it to Seiscomp SCXML, then importing it into our server to be accessed via FDSN as event data. Because we must do this manually, our cloned earthquake catalog is only updated monthly (usually on the 1st). Note that information such as phase arrivals is unfortunately not provided by GA.

Soon we will also begin hosting regionally specific catalogs with full phase picks.

SmartSolo Node Z Polarity bug (IGU-16HR only)

In late 2023 it was discovered that the vertical Z channel of the IGU-16HR short period SmartSolo nodes is actually inverted relative to the standard expectation of "positive up" (vertical axis dip = -90). EarthScope's solution was to add a -1 multiplier to the response data. Because we have a much smaller volume of this data to fix, and far less of it already distributed prior to this announcement, we have opted to do the opposite; e.g. we invert the raw data because the data is what is wrong; not the response.

Until very recently we also thought that the BD3C-5 "broadband" nodes had inverted data by default, but now understand that their raw exported data has the correct polarity.