Add a new station

This tutorial guides you through the most common activities involved in configuring a single new station in your existing SeisComP system. Depending on your needs, you will use parts of other tutorials to do this.

Pre-requisites for this tutorial:

You may also need to consult

Afterwards/Results/Outcomes:

  • Optionally, data for the new station are acquired and archived in real time.

  • Optionally, the new station is used for automatic real-time data processing.

Time range estimate:

  • Variable

Before you start

Try to answer the questions:

  • where will you get data?

  • if you want to process data locally, where will you get inventory?

  • which data will you share?

  • how long will you archive, and what streams?

For this example, we’ll add the GRSN Station Collm (CLL) from the GR network.

  • If you want to process data on this system, you will need inventory (metadata). Metadata can be obtained from many different sources or created from scratch.

  • If you don’t want to process on this system, you won’t need inventory, but you will have to create key file by hand for acquisition and archiving.

Obtaining inventory for your station

For processing, you will need inventory for the new station. How to obtain this will vary. You can fetch inventory from:

  • Other SeisComP systems. Use scxmldump to fetch inventories.

  • EIDA nodes [4]. Use web interfaces such as web browsers or wget to fetch an inventory.

  • Data centers providing FDSNWS [8]. Use web interfaces such as web browsers or wget to fetch an inventory.

  • Your own or shared user repositories on SMP [22].

Note

Create and share inventories

gempa’s SMP [22] is a tool for creating inventory from scratch and community sharing. Create inventories for new or old networks and stations from permanent or temporary deployments. SMP provides inventories in SCML format in multiple versions which can be used without modification.

Configuring inventory

Suppose that, by one of the methods above, we have it in a single file, inventory_CLL.xml. This must be converted from StationXML to SeisComP XML. The resulting file goes into ~/seiscomp/etc/inventory. See the chapter on Inventory.

~/seiscomp/bin/seiscomp exec import_inv  fdsnxml ~/inventory_CLL.xml
Generating output to /home/user/seiscomp/etc/inventory/inventory_CLL.xml
No inventory read from inventory db
Create empty one
Processing /home/user/inventory_CLL.xml
 - parsing StationXML
 - converting into SeisComP-XML
Finished processing
Writing inventory to /home/user/seiscomp/etc/inventory/inventory_CLL.xml

When inventory is loaded, you will see your station in the results of scinv with the ls option:

$ ~/seiscomp/bin/seiscomp exec scinv ls
WARNING: /home/user/seiscomp/etc/inventory/README ignored: wrong extension
[..]
Parsing /home/user/seiscomp/etc/inventory/MY.xml ... done
Parsing /home/user/seiscomp/etc/inventory/GE.xml ... done
[..]
Merging inventory ... done
  network GR       German Regional Seismic Network, BGR Hannover
    epoch 1976-02-17
    station CLL    GRSN Station Collm
      epoch 1993-04-01
      location __
        epoch 2007-02-07
        channel BHE
          epoch 2007-02-07
        channel BHN
          epoch 2007-02-07
        channel BHZ
          epoch 2007-02-07
        channel HHE
          epoch 2007-02-07

This shows the networks, stations, and channels, and the time spans for which they are known. For active stations, there must be an epoch (time span) with a start date but no end date shown for the desired channel.

The inventory is not yet synchronized with the database. To finalize inventory configuration, run:

$ seiscomp update-config

Warning

If you get an error, make sure that MySQL/MariaDB is running and the database has been created correctly (see Installation on Ubuntu).

Configuring for acquisition

If you’ve configured inventory above, you’ll already have a top-level key file for the station in the ~/seiscomp/etc/key directory.

Configuring processing

Now you can enable the station for processing. Follow the Configure real-time processing tutorial.

Configuring for archiving

If you want to archive waveforms, consider how long they should be retained. See Set up local waveform archiving for how to do this.