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News: update on status of SOSUS system from Bob Dziak (PMEL and OSU) [TCS]

I wanted to update you all on a few milestones that occurred in the past year to the North Pacific SOSUS hydrophone system we maintain here at PMEL-Newport. First, the Navy has for now completed their repairs to the three coastal arrays (of the six total) we use to monitor Juan de Fuca Ridge earthquakes. The good news is that two of the arrays are completely fixed and all hydrophones within each array have been restored to full operational capability. The bad news is that the cable for the array parted in very shallow water and the Navy was unable to repair it. They plan to visit the site again this summer and re-evaluate their repair plans. Even though we are still missing this one array, we will continue to detect and characterize well any volcanic/magmatic activity on the Juan de Fuca Ridge.

Second, we completed our effort of re-picking the arrival time of every earthquake (31,889+ events) in our 11 year database, vastly improving the quality of the SOSUS earthquake locations. This major undertaking began in 1999, and with a full-time analyst (Matt Fowler), was just completed last month. Now that this is complete it allows Matt and Joe Haxel to focus on processing North Pacific earthquake data in real-time.

Lastly, in November 2003 we installed a new acquisition system at the NAS Whidbey Island upgrading the ATOD and logging computer that was first installed in 1991. This took many months of time for Haru Matsumoto, Jonathan Klay, and Andy Lau to build and test the system. In addition, we have upgraded all three SOSUS processing workstations, upgraded the servers that transfer, beamform, and backup hydrophone data from Whidbey, added a 2-Terabyte hard-disk for temporary data storage (holds ~2 years of data), and added a gigabit network, all of which have significantly increased our data processing speed.

Overall, the PMEL-SOSUS system is in very good shape and has been upgraded to remain this way for several years to come. Please let me know if you have any questions.

— Bob Dziak, 2004