Enhancing remote monitoring of autonomous seismic stations

Abstract

<p>As part of the “Deutsches Seismologisches Breitband Array” (DSEBRA), a mobile station array of 100 identical seismological broadband stations, the remote monitoring devices “PowBox” were developed by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.</p> <p>The PowBoxes log and report the health status of the autonomously operating seismological stations, such as 12V/230V availability or battery temperature. With their various fail-safes the most common issues such as router and battery charger problems are fixed by automatic power resets and efforts and costs on unnecessary maintenance trips can be reduced.</p> <p>More than 80 PowBoxes are now in operation for the first time with the deployment of the DSEBRA stations in South-East Europe as part of the AdriaArray project, a follow-up to the successful AlpArray project.</p> <p>To ensure a good overview for the network operator, the modular Python software tool “survBot” was developed at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It analyses the different state-of-health channels of the PowBox and the Datalogger, displays them in a graphical user interface or as a html-webpage and informs about emerging problems via e-mail. It is openly available on github.</p>