Sod: Standing Order for Data

Access to digital seismological data from around the world has become increasingly rapid and easy with the expansion of data holdings at international, national, and regional data centers. Nonetheless, the actual task of getting the data from the data center to your own machine and into a form that is ready for analysis has always been a task that required considerable human interaction. That task just became much easier when accessing data from data centers that support the IRIS/FISSURES Data Handling Interface (DHI) protocols (Ahern, 2001a,b). With the release of SOD 2.0 ( Standing Order for Data ; http://www.seis.sc.edu/SOD), seismologists can now configure complex data requests that not only reach back into existing archives, but also remain in effect into the future. For example, a seismologist involved in a PASSCAL experiment can configure SOD to request data from permanent stations in his study region for all significant earthquakes that occur during the experiment. SOD will monitor global seismicity and request data for appropriate event-station pairs that will be delivered in SAC format to the seismologist's home machine for the duration of the experiment. Users can configure SOD to undertake a number of simple preprocessing tasks on the arriving data to prepare them for further processing or even build full analysis codes for inclusion in the SOD processing scheme. SOD is the core application behind two long-term automated processing efforts just getting underway at our institution. First, in conjunction with IRIS Education and Outreach and the DLESE Program Center, we are using SOD to analyze global seismograms automatically in order to take only the highest quality seismograms and (eventually) populate a Web site for K-16 educational purposes. Second, we have developed a SOD module that calculates receiver functions and estimates bulk crustal properties for use on EarthScope data. Thus, we …