Community Seismic Network: A Dense Array to Sense Earthquake Strong Motion

Abstract

The Community Seismic Network (CSN) is currently a 500‐element strong‐motion network located in the Los Angeles area of California (see Fig. 1). The sensors in the network are low‐cost microelectromechanical (MEM) accelerometers that are capable of recording on scale up to accelerations of ±2g. The primary product of the network is a set of measurements of ground shaking in the seconds following a major earthquake. An example of this is shown in Figure 2. The shaking information will be contributed to U.S. Geological Survey products such as ShakeMap (Wald et al., 1999) and ShakeCast (Wald et al., 2006), with the goal of providing first responders a proxy for damage that can guide efforts immediately following the event. The basic premise is the strong ground‐motion shaking varies on a subkilometer scale, which will require a dense network to meaningfully measure the shaking. Evidence for this comes from earthquakes recorded by dense oil company surveys in the Los Angeles area (Clayton et al., 2011).