Training

PASSCAL Workshop: Data Archiving and More!

Sunday, December 13, 2015
San Francisco - Zelos Hotel

Presentations are now online!  All are PDFs and the PH5 posters are a .gif and a .pdf

Session 1 - SEED Data Archiving

Session 2 - Instrument Responses (given by Mary Templeton of the IRIS DMC)

Session 3 - PH5 tools and future plans

PH5 poster from AGU 2013

Late-stage graduate students! Postdocs! Researchers and faculty!

IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center would like to invite you to register for our PASSCAL Users Workshop to be held on Sunday December 14th, 2014 (the day before the beginning of the AGU Fall meeting). 

This year’s workshop will give an overview of the PASSCAL facility, the services we provide and how to access them.  We will have two special guest speakers, PIs who have successfully planned for an run international and large-scale PASSCAL projects.  This year's speakers are Anne Meltzer of Lehigh University (large-scale broadband deployments in Pakistan, Tibet, and Mongolia) and David Okaya of the University of Southern California (large active source projects in Taiwan, New Zealand and Japan).

But wait, there is more! The PASSCAL Program Manager, Kent Anderson, as well as the PASSCAL Director, Bruce Beaudoin, will be on hand for questions and discussion as well.  Ask questions and discuss ideas about current/future projects before AGU really starts and the talks, posters, dinners, and other meetings start clamoring for everybody's attention and time!

This workshop will be useful to anyone who has an upcoming PASSCAL supported experiment, or is planning to propose an experiment, and will be particularly useful to current graduate students and new investigators.

In addition to loaning and maintaining devices from the instrument pool, and providing vital assistance to PIs in the field, PASSCAL also trains PIs and their colleagues at our facility in Socorro, New Mexico.  These training sessions can be intense, and typically last three days. The instruction is focused on the specific technical areas requested by PIs (such as data archival methods, or mastering the intricacies of specific sensors).

Training is important for both novice and well-seasoned PIs.  It provides hands-on interaction with the many types of instrumentation, software, and data handling that PASSCAL supplies, as well as the opportunity to ask questions that normally wouldn't come up until the PI is deploying equipment in the field.  Training at PASSCAL provides PIs with the opportunity to have their questions answered immediately by our on-site knowledgeable staff.

Three engineers from the Escuela Politecnica Nacional Ecuador, Instituto Geofísico, spent the first two weeks of May here at PASSCAL. They are planning a network of 63 permanent broadband stations, 25 emergency sites, and 70 accelerometer stations in Ecuador. These stations will be used to monitor volcanic activity and seismic events. Ecuador is home to more than 20 volcanoes, so this is an important undertaking not only for the scientific knowledge it will provide, but also for the safety of the Ecuadoran people.

  How long will it take? Training at the PASSCAL Instrument Center takes an average of 2 days to cover a typical experiment.    The first day involves an overview from the PI, a discussion of proposed logistics, introduction or review of project instrumentation and a practice site installation.  The second day covers station servicing and demobilization, the PASSCAL suite of software for data download and review, and introduction or review of PASSCAL preferred database and data archiving procedures. What can you expect from us?  Training on the hardware that PASSCAL Instrument Center will provide for your experiment.  This will include the Digitizer, Sensor(s), Handheld controllers, and Power Systems.