The GSC's new Internet Accelerograph

A new three-component strong-motion seismograph has been designed by the Geological Survey of Canada - Pacific, Sidney Subdivision. The instrument prototype was thoroughly tested in Canadian and German facilities. One hundred instruments were built under contract and more than 60 instruments have been deployed to date.

The instrument is now commercially available.

Highlights

The Internet Accelerograph features the following innovative concepts:

• Inexpensive mass-production acceleration sensors are used in a special configuration to increase their sensitivity to 0.5 mg (with g being the Earth' acceleration). For a comparison, the average person feels ground motion when it exceeds 15 mg.
• An embedded computer performs data acquisition, signal processing and provides Internet communications.
• The instrument maintains accurate time automatically by synchronizing with Internet time servers.
• Real-time processing is perfomed with better than 10 ms absolute timing accuracy.
• Three-component accelerometer, digitizer and Internet data server are combined in one compact instrument the size of a small shoe box.
• Derivative data, such as ground velocity, ground displacement and spectral intensity are computed as continuous data streams.
• Events and ground motion parameters are reported to a data-centre in near real time.
• Data retrieval and full control over acquisition parameters is accomplished over the Internet.

Further technical details on the Internet Accelerograph