Recent News

IRIS/PASSCAL seeks a Staff Scientist/Hardware Engineer to join our hardware team, supporting the development of innovative solutions for testing equipment and supporting PASSCAL projects, both internally and in the field. 

JOB DUTIES

Core responsibilities are to support routine testing of PASSCAL equipment and supporting PASSCAL engineering projects primarily in the lab and in the field as needed. Duties include: Routine testing of PASSCAL’s pooled hardware, research new products, materials and technologies that could advance the equipment pools and optimize support for PI experiments; test, develop and apply methods for testing seismic instrumentation and ancillary scientific equipment; development of specialized equipment to support geophysical installations in all environments; produce reports and maintain documentation and web content related to testing of scientific equipment; and as appropriate, field support of seismic experiments.  

The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Program for Array Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (IRIS PASSCAL) Instrument Center (www.passcal.nmt.edu) at New Mexico Tech is seeking applicants to fill the position of Hardware Specialist.

PASSCAL provides open-source software, PASSOFT, for downloading seismic data from data recorders, for quality assessment, and for conversion to other data formats for analysis and archiving at the IRIS Data Management Center. The latest version of PASSOFT is now available for general use. It is Python 3 compatible, and can be downloaded here.

The 2020 Polar Technology Conference is planned for 10–12 March 2020 in Boulder, Colorado. This activity is a cooperative effort among the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, and the polar research community.

The IRIS Education and Public Outreach program acquired a Sensors and Software Noggin GPR System with SmartCart configuration to enhance the IRIS PASSCAL equipment pool (see image at left). The system has onboard GPS, data acquisition programming, and preliminary data interpretation capabilities. The system has both line-scan or grid-scan data collection modes. The onboard software allows for quick survey setup, on-the-go viewing of the waveforms collected, and initial waveform depth estimates. Processed onboard data can be visualized as depth versus position along a line, or as a slice view of grid data. The PASSCAL Instrument Center offers additional software for more in-depth post acquisition processing and interpretation of the data.

Magnetotelluric (MT) methods are used to produce conductivity models of the crust and upper mantle through the recording of geoelectric and geomagnetic field variations at the Earth's surface. Depending on the period of the recordings, these methods can provide results from a few hundred meters depth (short period) to 30 km or deeper (long period). Conductivity is a physical property, which is complementary to seismic velocity, and which is very sensitive to the presence of fluids. When seismic and MT data sets are measured together, the additional data can dramatically improve determinations of the structure of the crust and mantle.  

Late 2018 PASSCAL learned of a GPS week rollover event that can affect data logger performance and timing. PASSCAL has acquired a GNSS signal generator that can emulate GPS satellite signals. This satellite emulator allows us to test PASSCAL equipment that relies on GPS timing and to determine how equipment will handle the GPS rollover event. To date, we have determined that some models of GPS engines are affected by the rollover. How the rollover errors manifest is dependent on the data logger’s model and firmware version of the GPS engine.