Specific action: Sismob – Mobile seismological equipment

Outlines

The Mobile Seismological equipment Specific Action (SA Sismob) is attached to the Seismology Thematic Group. This is France’s national fleet of mobile land seismological instruments, the 3rd largest internationally after the PASSCAL network of IRIS (USA) and GIPP of GFZ (Germany).

The whole set, hosted at ISTerre Grenoble, comprises 220 seismological stations, 120 of which are conventional broadband or medium-band stations and 100 autonomous short-period ‘nodes’. With about twenty A-rank publications per year, Sismob is a major research service for the French seismology community. Its website describes the instruments available to the community and allows equipment reservation requests. This equipment is only available to French academic institutional partners and members of Epos-France.

Objectives

The objectives of Sismob are to collect seismological data on specific targets in the absence of permanent observatories, or to complete these observatories by significantly increasing the density of spatial sampling. The duration of the experiments is limited and varies from a few weeks to 2 years, with an average duration of a few months. This service exists for 20 years.

Sismob’s fields of application cover all the objectives of observational seismology, from the study of the Earth’s internal structure to the study of seismic, volcanic and land movement hazards. For example, Sismob supplied the stations for the AlpArray European Community project in France. The SA also participates in post-seismic interventions, such as the earthquake of 11 November 2019 in Le Teil, for which Sismob provided 30 seismological stations, the data from which will help us to better understand the spatial distribution and characteristics of aftershocks.

In brief

  • Web site: sismob.epos-france.fr
  • Thematic Group: Seismology
  • Instrumentation: Mobile
  • Supervisor and web contact:  Florent Brenguier, Osug (ISTerre)
  • Technical contacts:  Coralie Aubert (ISTerre, instrumentation et dév.) et Sandrine Roussel (ISTerre, plateforme Sismob et web), Osug
  • Participating partners:  UGA