About SeisComP 3

Introduction

The seismological software SeisComP has evolved within the last approximately 10 years from pure acquisition modules to a fully featured real-time earthquake monitoring software. The now very popular SeedLink protocol for seismic data transmission has been the core of SeisComP from the very beginning. Later additions included simple, purely automatic event detection, location and magnitude determination capabilities.

Especially within the development of the 3rd-generation SeisComP, also known as "SeisComP 3", automatic processing capabilities have been augmented by graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for vizualization, rapid event review and quality control. Communication between the modules is achieved using a Spread based TCP/IP infrastructure that allows distributed computing and remote review. For seismological metadata exchange export/import to/from QuakeML is avalable, which also provides a convenient interface with 3rd-party software. The initial SeisComP3 development took place at GFZ between 2006 and 2008 within the GITEWS project (German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System, Hanka et al., 2010). From the SeisComP3 development group the gempa GmbH software company was outsourced.

Components of a SeisComP 3 system

The SeisComP 3 package consists of

• SeedLink for real-time data acquisition
• ArcLink for rapid access to archive data
• Highly portable C++ libraries for
  • database access, currently with support for
    • MySQL
    • PostGreSQL
    • SQLite
  • inter-process communication
  • waveform access, handling, processing and quality control
  • seismological computations
  • error logging
• Programs for
  • data archival
  • automated event processing incl.
    • phase picking
    • phase association
    • location
    • magnitude computation
  • waveform quality control
• Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for
  • event visualization
  • event mapping
  • waveform visualization
  • waveform quality control
  • event review (manual re-picking)
  • state-of-health monitoring
• QuakeML import/export
• Wrappers for the Python programming language

SeisComP 3 currently runs under most Unix or Unix-like operating systems, incl.

• Linux (all reasonably recent releases of Ubuntu, SuSE, etc.)
• Solaris
• MacOSX (experimental!)

Windows is currently not supported.

SeisComP3 uses software developed by Spread Concepts LLC for use in the Spread toolkit. For more information about Spread see http://www.spread.org