Data Services Newsletter

Volume 15 : No 2 : Fall 2013

Super Ground Motion Visualizations (SGMVs)

The USArray Ground Motion Visualization (GMV) is a video-based IRIS DS data product that illustrates how seismic waves travel away from an earthquake location by depicting the normalized recorded wave amplitudes at each seismometer location using colored station symbols to represent seismic wave amplitudes.

To visualize the ground motion in an area larger than the footprint of the USArray at the time of the event, one can combine GMVs from multiple earthquakes from a common source area spanning different periods in the array’s deployment as it rolls across America. The resulting combined movie, a Super GMV (SGMV) simulates a GMV if all USArray station locations were occupied at once.

Six Gulf of California events with similar focal mechanisms and magnitudes ranging from M5.9 to M6.8 that occurred between 2007 and 2013 were used to create the initial SGMV. Additional event sets are added to the Super GMV Repository as more events are processed.

Figure 1 - Super GMV
Figure 1: DS Super (Combined) GMV screenshot of Gulf of California events, 2007 – 2013

by Chad Trabant (IRIS DMC) , Alex Hutko (IRIS Data Management Center) , Manoch Bahavar (IRIS Data Management Center) , Rich Karstens (IRIS Data Management Center) and Tim Ahern (IRIS Data Management Center)

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