Puerto Rico Strong Motion Seismic Network
By:
Carlos I. Huerta-López, José A. Martínez-Cruzado, Jaffet Martínez-Pagan, Erick Santana-Torres, Denny Mariana Torres-Ortíz
Submitted to Workshop on:
National Geophysical Networks in Latin America
Best practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Collaboration
Santiago, Chile May 24-29, 2015
ABSTRACT
The Puerto Rico Strong Motion Seismic Network is currently in charge of the maintenance/operation of strong motion stations of: (i) free-field (ff), (ii) instrumented structures (STR) (Dams, Bridges, Buildings), and (iii) the data acquisition/monitoring/analysis of large earthquakes from the point of view of their intensity and magnitude. All these instruments are deployed in the Puerto Rico Island (PRI), the US-,the British-Virgin Islands (US-VI, B-VI), and the Dominican Republic (DR). The Puerto RicoIsland and the Caribbean region have high potential to be affected by earthquakes that could be catastrophic for the area.
The Puerto Rico Strong Motion Seismic Network (currently Puerto Rico Strong Motion Program, PRSMP) is operated by the Civil Engineering and Surveying Department of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). PRSMPhas grown since 1970's from 7ff strong motion stations and one instrumented building with analog accelerographs to 110ffstrong motion stations and 18STRinstrumented with digital accelerographs(PRI: 91ff, 16STR., DR: 13ff, US-VI: 1ff, B-VI: 5ff, 2STR collecting data via:internet, telephone, and stand-alone stations. All the stations are equipped with triaxial accelerometers (±2g), GPS, and 24 bits data loggers recording at sampling rate of 200 Hz.
The administration/operation of the PRSMP is based in a central server running Antelope 5.4 (BRTT, three nodes license)in a Dell/PowerEdge servers (at UPRM/PRSMP) with CentOS 6.5. The data is concentrated at UPRM/PRSMP in real-time via Internet, and near real-time by telephone lines.
In addition to the above, an Earthworm 7.7 (Public domain code) runs in a Dell/PowerEdge servers (at: UPRM/PRSMP) and in a Dell/Precision Workstations (at: BVI, AEE) also running CentOS 6.5, are connected trough internet providing the communication to PRSMP at UPRM. The stations deployed in DR are operated by the Instituto Sismológico Universitario (ISU), and data transmitted by internet to PRI.
The current stage of the PRSMP seismic network, the analysis of selected moderate earthquakes that were recorded and/or occurred on the island, the preliminary results of the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and instrumental intensity distribution, as well as results of dynamic parameter identification of some of the instrumented structures are here presented.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the NSF and IRIS consortium for the financial support. Mrs. Rocío Escamilla Esquivel helped with the ESRI-GIS products in obtaining the maps and coding computer programs for file-formatting, plotting the simulated drum records, the re-organization of the data base and manipulation of the geographic information databases.