Sensor suite: The Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory Instrumentation Testing Suite

Abstract

To standardize parameters used in seismometer testing and calibration and to make these algorithms accessible to the seismological community, we have developed a new seismometer testing software package called Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory (ASL) Sensor Test Suite. This software is written in Java and makes use of Seismological Exchange for Earthquake Data (SEED) format. Our goal is not to be all‐inclusive but instead to focus on a few of the instrumentation tests we view as critical when verifying a sensor’s performance. The tests include self‐noise, relative azimuth, relative gain, and estimation of the poles and zeros. For the self‐noise and the relative azimuth, we also include three‐component versions of these tests to allow for the case of sensors with potentially different orientations (e.g., boreholes). The software has been made available on GitHub with the hope that it will be useful for other seismologists who need to quickly verify various sensor parameters without having to write their own versions of the algorithms. Furthermore, by using a common platform and processing algorithms, it becomes possible to compare results among different tests with similar processing methods being used for both.