Northern California
Management Center

The details of the Northern California processing system and the REDI project have been described in past annual reports. In this section, we will describe how the Northern California Management Center fits within the CISN system, detail recent developments, and discuss plans for the future development.

Figure 4.3 in Chapter 4 illustrates the NCMC as part of the the CISN communications ring. The NCMC is a distributed center, with elements in Berkeley and Menlo Park. The 35 mile separation between these two centers is in sharp contrast to the Southern California Management Center, where the USGS Pasadena is located across the street from the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. As described in Chapter 4, the CISN partners are connected by a dedicated T1 communications link, with the capability of falling back to the Internet. In addition to the CISN ring, the BSL and the USGS Menlo Park have a second dedicated communication link to provide bandwidth for shipping waveform data and other information between their processing systems.

Figure 10.1 provides more detail on the current system at the NCMC. At present, two Earthworm-Earlybird systems in Menlo Park feed two ``standard" REDI processing systems at UC Berkeley. One of these systems is the production or paging system; the other is set up as a hot backup. The second system is frequently used to test new software developments before migrating them to the production environment. The Earthworm-Earlybird-REDI systems perform the standard detection, location, estimation of $M_{d}$, $M_{L}$, and $M_{w}$, as well as processing of ground motion data. The computation of ShakeMaps is also performed on two systems, one in Menlo Park and one in Berkeley, as described below. An additional system performs finite-fault processing and the computation of higher level ShakeMaps.

Figure 10.1: Detailed view of the current Northern California processing system, showing the two Earthworm-Earlybird-REDI systems, the two ShakeMap systems, and the finite-fault system.

The dense network and Earthworm-Earlybird processing environment of the NCSN provides rapid and accurate earthquake locations, low magnitude detection thresholds, and first-motion mechanisms for smaller quakes. The high dynamic range data loggers, digital telemetry, and broadband and strong-motion sensors of the BDSN and REDI analysis software provide reliable magnitude determination, moment tensor estimation, peak ground motions, and source rupture characteristics. Robust preliminary hypocenters are available about 25 seconds after the origin time, while preliminary coda magnitudes follow within 2-4 minutes. Estimates of local magnitude are generally available 30-120 seconds later, and other parameters, such as the peak ground acceleration and moment magnitude, follow within 1-4 minutes (Figure 10.2).

Earthquake information from the joint notification system is distributed by pager/cellphone, e-mail, and the WWW. The first two mechanisms ``push" the information to recipients, while the current Web interface requires interested parties to actively seek the information. Consequently, paging and, to a lesser extent, e-mail are the preferred methods for emergency response notification. The recenteqs site has enjoyed enormous popularity since its introduction and provides a valuable resource for information whose bandwidth exceeds the limits of wireless systems and for access to information which is useful not only in the seconds immediately after an earthquake, but in the following hours and days as well.

Figure 10.2: Illustration of the current (solid lines) and planned/proposed (dotted lines) development of real-time processing in northern California. The Finite Fault I and II are fully implemented within the REDI system at UC Berkeley and are integrated with ShakeMap. The resulting maps are still being evaluated and are not currently available to the public.