The IRIS/PASSCAL facility provides equipment (sensors, portable field recording equipment, and field computers) to any research or educational institution to use for research or educational purposes. PASSCAL publishes an inventory of all of its equipment through the IRIS World Wide Web site (http://www.iris.edu). A description of the capabilities of the various pieces of equipment and a copy of the current instrument schedule are available with the inventory. The PASSCAL instrumentation and technical support to maximize the success of each field deployment are provided, without charge, as part of the facility support developed by IRIS through funding from the Instrumentation and Facilities Program, Earth Sciences Division, National Science Foundation. The efficient use of these instruments requires cooperation and communication between PASSCAL and the experiment PI. The Principal Investigator is encouraged to contact the PASSCAL Program Manager about any planned experiment during the proposal development stage to address any questions about instrument capabilities. Initial instrument requests can be submitted via the Worldwide Web at http://www.iris.edu and should be sent to IRIS at the time the proposal is sent to the funding agency.
As a community resource, IRIS and NSF rely on the individual PIs to conform to a limited number of rules and conditions related to the use of PASSCAL instruments, to treat the instruments with care, and to acknowledge the support which is provided. The equipment in the PASSCAL facility represents a significant community resource. In order to encourage the use of the data by others making the facility more valuable to the community, IRIS policy states that all data collected by instruments from the PASSCAL facility should be submitted to the Data Management Center so that it can be accessed by other interested investigators after a two year proprietary period. IRIS´s policy is that delivery of data to the DMC is an obligation of the PI. The official data delivery policy is that IRIS expects data delivery while the experiment is in the field (for long term deployments), or immediately at the conclusion of the experiment. The data and Data Report will remain confidential for a period of two years after the end of the field work.
The two year time period is generally reasonable for most experiments and provides enough time for PIs to publish significant results. Some concerns have been expressed because a two year proprietary period could result in a significant delay in the release of data from a long term broadband deployment. The concern is greatest when data are recorded from a significant global event (eg. large magnitude or deep focus). We encourage PIs who might fortuitously record such an event during a PASSCAL deployment to consider releasing waveforms from at least one station before the two year restricted period ends, so that these events can be studied by the broader IRIS community.
The ultimate responsibility for delivery of the data rests with the Principal Investigator. Every field computer has the software necessary to accomplish the data delivery task and each of the PASSCAL Instrument Centers has personnel who can provide assistance to the PI during and after the experiment. Each of the Instrument Centers also has software, computers, and large disk systems available for use by the PI. The Data Management System has additional facilities and support available to the PI. The PI is encouraged to utilize these resources at all stages of the work.
PIs conducting a passive source experiment can use the PASSCAL database or equivalent software to provide all of the data collected to the DMC for archive in SEED format. It is expected that the PI will ship the data to the DMC on a continuing basis during the experiment, as soon as timing and other corrections are made and that the final data will arrive shortly after the experiment is over. The advantage of completing these tasks in the field is that the analysis phase of the project begins almost immediately after leaving the field, rather than having to deal with merging field notes, correcting, and formatting data post-experiment. Archiving data at the completion of the field experiment allows the PI to take advantage of the incredible resources available at the DMC to produce network day volume or event volumes of selected events for continuous data. Active source experiments can submit data in SEGY format. The DMC will make the data available only to the PI or designated representative for a period of two years after the completion of the experiment. After that, the data will be made available to the public.
The Data Report is not intended as a formal technical paper but at a minimum should contain:
