Recent News

Until October 1, 2020, the PIC has partnered with the National Geoelectromagnetic Facility (NGF) at Oregon State University (http://ngf.oregonstate.edu/) to offer 27 Narod Intelligent Magnetotelluric Systems (NIMS) for MT investigations. The NIMS is a 1 Hz sample rate long-period MT instrument. It includes a Triaxial ring-core magnetometer (left), OSU Pb-PbCl2 gel-type electrodes (top) and a receiver unit which contains its data acquisition system (bottom). The NIMS receivers have been recently updated to support continued usage. They contain new GNSS receivers to replace the original GPS receivers, providing a faster satellite lock and larger set of satellite constellations and improving the ability to acquire precise system timing under challenging conditions, such as extensive tree canopy.

 New installation scripts for the PASSOFT software suite have been developed by the software group, and are now available for public download on this page. The PASSOFT suite includes open-source software 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.

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.

PASSCAL is pleased to announce the release of Nexus, a simple tool for creating SEED meta-data.

Nexus is a software tool with a graphical interface that allows users to quickly and easily create and modify SEED meta-data. It outputs StationXML, the recently adopted replacement format for Dataless SEED. Nexus greatly simplifies preparing data for archival at the DMC. 

JOB DUTIES:

Computer and network systems administration. Provides professional technical support services to facility staff and users, such as network, data storage, web, database, application development, as well as IT security, general IT help, and IT repair.

As a response to the seismological community's desire to deploy a larger number of 3-component nodal seismic systems, the IRIS PASSCAL standing committee has guided IRIS management to procure more nodes for the PASSCAL pool. IRIS already has 73 Magseis Fairfield ZLAND 3-component 5Hz nodes in the pool and these have been subscribed for more than 2 years out. We have now begun the procurement of another 460 Magseis Fairfield nodes for general PASSCAL pool use. We expect to receive these new nodes in the fall of 2018. The new nodes should be ready for general pool usage starting in February, 2019 after evaluation and acceptance is complete (bringing the general node pool to 533 units). Please feel free to include the new nodes in instrument requests for experiments with start dates after February 2019.

IRIS/PASSCAL has updated our Data Policy. The new Policy, which was published on November 1, 2017,  can be perused here. It details the archiving requirements for data collected with IRIS PASSCAL equipment through the PASSCAL Instrument Center (PIC)