FDSN Working Group V

FDSN	International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks

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FDSN Working Group V on Portable Instrumentation

The Working Group on Portable Instrumentation was formed at the 2003 meeting of the FDSN in Sapporo, Japan. This working group will coordinate the activities of the various groups around the globe that deploy portable instruments in field experiments.

Areas of interest to the working group include:

promote the use of uniform data archive formats and access methods.
promotion of open access to data after an exclusive use period.
promote best practice among FDSN members.
develop and maintain an inventory of available equipment on the FDSN website.
maintain an archive of metadata about past, current and planned experiments through links from the FDSN website.
maintain a list of links to ocean bottom seismometer pools.

The current membership of WG V:
Alex Brisbourne (Chair) - SEIS-UK
James Gridley, Passcal
Jim Lyons - GSC, Canada
Christa von Hillebrandt, Puerto Rice SN
Jean-Claude Le Pine IPGP/Geoscope
Albrecht Schultze / Michael Weber / Winfried Hanka, GFZ

Recommended Data Format
FDSN recommend the use of full SEED or miniseed with dataless seed volumes as the preferred archive data format. This format is already in use across the seismological community and is the preferred format of the large data centres.

A full SEED manual is available from the IRIS website.
Utilities for reading (rdseed), writing (PDCC) and evaluating (evalresp) SEED volumes are also available via the IRIS website software listing.
Utilities for manipulating miniseed data are available in the PASSCAL software package, e.g. qmerge, mseedmod, mseedhdr.

Recommended Data Access Criteria
FDSN encourage all users of portable instrumentation to make their data available to the wider community as soon as possible. All users should archive their data with a data centre which allows rapid access to the global community. It is common practise for groups to release their data by default after a fixed period, of 0-3 years.

FDSN Network Codes
FDSN recommends that all temporary deployments are assigned an FDSN network code via the online form. These codes provide uniqueness to seismological data streams. By using these codes for all future experiments, a readily accessible database of projects undertaken by equipment pools can easily be maintained. Even if data are not archived with a data centre, the database would allow data users to find any potential collaborators who have been working in similar areas.

Available Instrumentation