Activities of the Canadian National Data Centre
The CNDC is staffed by two groups: a Data Management and Operations Group, and a Systems and Applications Development Group. Together, they support the following activities:
- Operate the Canadian National Seismograph Network
- Manage and Operate the Canadian National Data Centre
- National WaveForm Archive
- Develop the National Earthquake Database
- Systems and Applications Development
National Seismograph Network Operations
The goal of the National Seismograph Network Operations activity is to support the detection and location all earthquakes above magnitude 3.5 in Canada and its offshore areas, and above magnitude 2.0 in regions of enhanced socio-economic importance, such as urban areas, hydrocarbon development zones, nuclear power plant sites, short-term seismically active areas, etc. This is accomplished by acquiring and archiving continuous digital broad band and extremely short period data in near real time from the Canada-wide network of Autonomous Remote Outstations, by performing automated detection and location processing, and by issuing e-mail alerts to Seismologists. This activity also requires continual monitoring of various telecommunications links and maintaining contacts with satellite and terrestrial service providers.
Manage and Operate the National Data Centre
This activity involves developing, maintaining, and operating the computer systems and related hardware connected to the CNDC, the physical and environmental facilities, and providing software and support services required to maintain the earthquake monitoring and analysis capability of the Earthquake Seismology portion of the Canadian Hazard Information Service.
National Waveform Archive
The overall goal of the National Waveform Archive (NWFA) project is to develop and maintain a centralized storage and playback facility for all digital waveform data acquired and processed in support of the NEHP and CTBT Verification prtograms. This required a major effort to transcribe all data from earlier Optical Disk and tape archives into a common format.
This same facility has allowed more rigorous automatic full, differential, and incremental backups of all CNDC servers.
National Earthquake Database Development
The goal of the National Earthquake Database (NEDB) Development project is to design and implement a data base to fully meet the needs of the seismology program; to develop, test and implement the necessary software to load in past data and handle new data; to check, load and where necessary merge, old data; and to support current seismicity and seismic verification processing.
Systems and Applications Development
The goal of the Systems and Applications Development group is to research and develop specialized hardware and software systems for the acquisition, analysis, database storage, and dissemination of seismological data.