Seismic Instrumentation Design

This book is a collection of three papers authored by Dr. Raman K Attri between 1999 to 2001. The book presents early-career scientific work by the author as a scientist at a research organization. The book provides a theoretical and conceptual understanding of concepts and principles for detection and measurements of the seismic signals. The earthquake phenomenon is one of the most unpredictable and often devastating natural events. Sophisticated and advanced technologies are being used for monitoring the seismic activities across the world and efforts are being put in place to develop prediction models. The theory behind the design of sensors, instrumentation and monitoring system is usually not known to electronics and software engineers upfront. The papers included in this book provide such basic guidance to electronics and software design engineers and equip them with the key computational and algorithmic principles based on the underlying theory of seismic activities. These design techniques are fundamental to designing sophisticated seismic instrumentation and earthquake monitoring systems.

The first paper presents a simplified mathematical framework of the seismic events and backend computational software logic that will enable software engineers to develop a customized seismic analysis and computation software.

The second paper presents a simplified description of various earthquake parameters of interest to a seismologist and how these complex parameters are computed using equations.

In the third paper, a visionary concept is presented to integrate geo-scientific instrumentation equipment such as seismic measurement systems to information technology network that would create a centralized web-enabled database that would allow transmitting the data acquired by geographically distributed but networked observatories to better predict or alert about the phenomena like earthquakes.