Introduction

This tutorial shows how to determine the self noise of an instrument though the comparison of the output of two instruments operating side-by-side.

This is an implementation of the work by G. Holcomb at the USGS:
     Holcomb, G. L. (1989).
     A Direct Method for Calculating Instrument Noise Levels in Side-by-Side Seismometer Evaluations,
     USGS Open-File Report 89-214

The concept is that the output of an instrument consists of both the effect of actual ground motion and internal instrumental noise. If two isntruments are operated side-by-side, then one has sufficient information to separate the ground motion and the two instrumental components.

Software

All codes and sample data sets are contained in the tar-ball selfnoise.tgz
Download this file and unpack using the command
    gunzip -c selfnoise.tgz | tar xf -
This will create a directory SELFNOISE with the following contents (file listing)

The most important file is the 00README which tells you how to compile and run the programs.

Test Data Sets

Two data sets are provided which compare the 00 and 01 data stream for the LHZ component at ANMO  and the LHZ, LHN and LHE components at KMI.  The are contained in the directories ANMO.TEST and KMI.TEST.  Each directory has a SEED volume for 24 hours of continuoous data from the stations. The SEED volumes were obtained from IRIS.

The shell script DOCROSS does the following:
    1, unpacks the SEED volume
    2. applies the technique to the LHZ for ANMO and LHZ, LHN and LHE for KMI
    3. plots the results:

ANMO


This compares two instruments. For each sensor, the figures give the gound noise esitmate (triangle), total noise estimate (light blue line, the instrument self noise (red circles) and the low and high noise model bounds.  For this day we can compare the total noise estiamte of sensor 2 (location code 10) to the plots available from USGS/IRIS as a check on our code.

Sensor 1
Sensor 2
Coherency
1
2
coher

USGS PDF


KMI


Sensor 1
Sensor 2
Coherency
Z1
Z1
zcoher
n1
N2
zcoher
E1
E2
zcoher