Item

Abstract

In 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hosted an international workshop titled “Future Opportunities in Regional and Global Seismic Network Monitoring and Science”, in which members identified and prioritized areas of research to improve global seismic monitoring. This meeting directly informed the USGS National Earthquake Information Center’s (NEIC) 5-year strategic plan. The international, real-time, sharing of parametric earthquake data was identified as a critical area of development that could improve monitoring. The need for rapid parametric data sharing became even more apparent following the COVID-19 pandemic, as many monitoring operations were strained. As all monitoring agencies have similar missions, to rapidly report on earthquakes and their effects in efforts to mitigate impacts, the community can greatly benefit by mutually supporting each other through automatic information sharing. In 2022, the NEIC hosted a follow-up workshop supported by the USGS Powell Center. The workshop prioritized updates following the COVID-19 pandemic and addressed the specific task of international parametric data sharing. We discussed how to rapidly communicate operational information between our agencies (e.g., system outages), the types of automatic derived earthquake data we should be sharing, and infrastructure requirements. The working group decided to explore automatically sharing picks and moment tensors, leveraging easily deployable messaging software such as Apache Kafka. We identified other areas where further discussion could benefit our agencies, such as our standard operating procedures (SOPs) for source characterization. Here we will share the outcome of these meetings and discuss how they fit into NEIC’s strategic plan priorities.