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Abstract

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network monitors seismicity in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington as part of the U.S. Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS). The network has been in existence for more than fifty years and was initially focused on the Puget Sound region in western Washington and several of the Cascades volcanoes. It now covers all of Washington and most of Oregon. Over the decades, the instrumentation and processing software has changed significantly. For example, we mostly operated analog vertical-component short-period stations in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. We first added digital three-component broadband stations in the mid to late 1990s, and since 2000, continuously streaming three-component strong-motion stations. In the past five years, as a partner in the USGS ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning system, we have added hundreds of new strong-motion and/or broadband stations. All our data, waveforms as well as derived products, are publicly available. However, users of both our seismicity catalog and old waveform data need to understand that they come with caveats. Here we present several of these caveats including a study of the spatial and temporal variation of the magnitude of completeness of the PNSN catalog.