The Station Information System (SIS): A Centralized Seismic Station Repository for Populating, Managing, and Distributing Metadata

Ellen Yu, Prabha Acharya, Justin Jaramillo, Sue Kientz, Valerie Thomas, & Egill Hauksson

Published January 1, 2018, SCEC Contribution #7303

Creating, maintaining and archiving accurate station metadata is critical for successful seismic network operations and research. The Station Information System (SIS) is an inventory repository of seismic station field equipment, response and site information. It has a web-based user interface that enables the creation and manipulation of the corresponding metadata. The system can track the installation, maintenance, and removal of equipment from a site, which often results in the creation of new metadata epochs.

SIS also computes the overall response, including gain, of a data channel by combining the response of the underlying hardware components. SIS distributes this information in standard formats such as FDSN StationXML and dataless SEED. SIS can also be used to manage inventory of field equipment such as power, telemetry, or GPS antenna, as well as links to other site related repositories to give the network operator the most complete view of the characteristics of a site and the overall network.

SIS was originally developed by the Southern California Earthquake Data Center (SCEDC) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to manage the metadata needs of the Caltech/USGS Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN). SIS has been under development during the past four years to meet the needs of multiple regional seismic networks. This effort is funded by USGS Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) ; Filson and Arabaz, 2017). A technical group comprised of representatives from various ANSS regional seismic networks oversees its development. The development staff is located at Caltech.

This paper will summarize the main features in the SIS user-interface used to maintain station metadata. We will present its basic infrastructure, holdings, workflow, and how regional seismic networks (RSNs) retrieve data from it. We also explain the reasoning to pursue one centralized repository and why it is beneficial to the goals of SIS as well as ANSS. We demonstrate that SIS provides the ANSS network operator with a complete site view, which enables the production of high quality metadata, which is a necessary prerequisite for producing high quality seismic data.

Key Words
Metadata, instrumentation

Citation
Yu, E., Acharya, P., Jaramillo, J., Kientz, S., Thomas, V., & Hauksson, E. (2018). The Station Information System (SIS): A Centralized Seismic Station Repository for Populating, Managing, and Distributing Metadata. Seismological Research Letters, 89(1), 47-55.

Related Projects & Working Groups
SCEDC