Thread: Growth of PASSCAL Node Pool

As a response to the seismological community's desire to deploy a larger number of 3-component nodal seismic systems, the IRIS PASSCAL standing committee has guided IRIS management to procure more nodes for the PASSCAL pool. IRIS already has 73 Fairfield ZLAND 3-component 5Hz nodes in the pool and these have been subscribed for more than 2 years out. We have now begun the procurement of another 460 Fairfield nodes for general PASSCAL pool use. We expect to receive these new nodes in the fall of 2018. The new nodes should be ready for general pool usage starting in February, 2019 after evaluation and acceptance is complete (bringing the general node pool to 533 units). Please feel free to include the new nodes in instrument requests for experiments with start dates after February 2019.

In addition, NSF is funding the successor to SAGE (this was known as NGEO, but will now be referred to as SAGE-II) for five years. As part of this new award, we will further expand the node pool in the first three years of SAGE-II to more than 1,000 nodes to provide enhanced wavefield imaging capabilities. As such, we expect to continue to grow our node capabilities in the coming years and will make announcements to the community as step increases in our node pool are realized. We will also be enhancing the node-handling infrastructure to help improve larger node experiments.

Thank you for your continued input to the PASSCAL Standing Committee on capabilities for the PASSCAL pool. We are excited to enhance the pool’s nodal capabilities and enable the exciting science that will result from these new instruments. We will be making similar announcements as other SAGE-II procurements come to pass - including enhancements to smaller, intermediate period instrumentation to further enhance wavefield imaging and instrumentation for rapid response to geohazard events.

Susan Schwartz - Chair, PASSCAL/Portable Standing Committee

Kent Anderson - IRIS Portable Program Manager