Mojave Broadband Seismic Experiment

For much of my passive seismic deployment career, I've worked on networks that you can drive to from my institution. In 2016, I deployed an aftershock array in Ecuador with the University of Arizona, Lehigh University, and the Geophysical Institute in Quito and one of the key lessons I learned was to add an extra day just in case things go wrong. If you need to, you can spend more time in the field. If not needed, you can explore the field area. Well, for this Mojave service run I decided to ignore the contingency day and just schedule the days I thought we needed so the students could get back to class. However, they were amazing in the field and we finished all 19 stations a day early. So, given the extra day available to work and 2 stations with GPS cables that had met the wrong side of critter teeth, we decided to use our extra day to install some protection for the GPS cables on as many sites as we could. Installing this protection, in the form of $0.25 pool noodles, took abo...

This morning it rained in the desert. Sometimes the desert rain is a soft mist and other times it's a torrential downpour; today, we had both. It rained overnight in Barstow and the scent of the moistened desert filled the air. As we drove to the field, the rain fluctuated between light mist and downpour. As we got to our first site, MOJH, the rain was still pretty substantial and the datalogger has bluetooth connectivity issues. Thankfully, everything appeared fine, so we did our best to get the data copied and the cable protection installed as quickly as possible. Our other two sites, MOJI and MOJJ, presented little problem and the rain quickly died down once we reached the first site. The hiking between sites was a bit rough: we were constantly going over little hills and taking advantage of the few flat washes we could find. The other team had some bigger station issues, however. One station's solar panels weren't working, but they were able to fix them. Another stat...

With the second full day of the service done, I've had a chance to look at some samples of the data. We'll need to sort through more, but the samples I've looked at below are some of the cleanest waveforms I've ever seen. I'm very encouraged by these samples, but there's about 380Gb of data to comb through, so I can't get overly excited just yet.  As for the work, another good day done. Each team got all their stations done, but we did have a bit of an issue with cables. Rob and Brandon's team had one station in which the sensor cable was chewed up a bit, but I don't think any of the severed wires are actually used. We swapped out the cable anyways, just to be safe. Kelly and Simone found 2 stations with severed GPS cables, so they swapped those out. GPS are just for clock corrections, so it shouldn't be too big of a problem, but I'm glad we brought plenty of spares so the stations are in good shape now. This has also given me a chance to...