About
The Quality Assurance (QA) team at EarthScope is tasked with monitoring the quality of the EarthScope seismic data archive and providing resources relating to data quality to the earth science community. On this page you will find information on general QA practices, MUSTANG metrics and PDFs, and links to QA related products and services at EarthScope.
Quality Assurance Mission Statement
QA Related Web Services, Products, and Software
Web Services and Client Tools
MUSTANG, Modular Utility for Statistical Knowledge Gathering: seismic data quality metrics and Probability Density Functions (PDFs).
- Introduction to MUSTANG
- MUSTANG Databrowser , a web based MUSTANG metrics plotting tool
- MUSTANGular , an interactive map viewer of station metrics
Products
Synthetic Seismograms
Global ShakeMovie synthetics at EarthScope
Global ShakeMovie synthetics event listing at EarthScope
A full listing of seismic data products at EarthScope is available at the Data Products Repository Portal
Software
R Package on CRAN, IRISMustangMetrics is the official public release of R code used by MUSTANG to calculate metrics.
ISPAQ (IRIS System for Portable Assessment of Quality), software for calculating MUSTANG-style seismic data quality metrics on a local machine.
QuARG (Quality Assurance Report Generator), software for network operators to find station problems using MUSTANG metrics and user-specified threshold values, examine the generated problem list using links to QA tools, document the issues in a ticketing system, and create a formatted HTML report from the tickets.
PIQQA (PI’s Quick Quality Assessment), software for generating automated reports summarizing data availability and noise levels for PASSCAL and other temporary experiments.
Other Resources
Citations and DOIs
To cite the MUSTANG system or reference the use of MUSTANG metrics:
- Assuring the Quality of EarthScope Data with MUSTANG
Robert Casey, Mary E. Templeton, Gillian Sharer, Laura Keyson, Bruce R. Weertman, Tim Ahern
Seismological Research Letters (2018) 89 (2A): 630-639.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220170191
Contact Us
Questions, comments, and suggestions related to quality assurance or data issues at EarthScope can be directed to:
help@earthscope.org
News
- (2026-09-15) MUSTANG Clients have moved to new URLs under https://data.earthscope.org
- (2026-07-23) MUSTANG metrics update:
Starting July 27, 2026 the EarthScope fdsnws-availability service will be out of service for an undetermined period of time. As a result, the suite of MUSTANG metrics that are derived from the fdsnws-availability service output (aka ts_ metrics) will not be available until a new fdsnws-availability service is implemented. The metrics affected are any MUSTANG metric whose name is prefaced by “ts_”, including ts_percent_availability, ts_num_gaps, ts_num_gaps_total, ts_gap_length, etc.
Frequently Answered Questions
There are currently 2 Quality Assurance related questions:
- Does EarthScope perform quality assurance on the data it receives?
- What does the M, D, R, or Q character mean in my data file name?
Tutorials
There are currently 4 Quality Assurance tutorials:
