Week Four

July 12th, 2010

Early this week I finished my cross correlation script, and ran it on one component of one station over around 1300 seconds.  This took an hour, which was much longer than we expected.  We had hoped to run it on all 3 components on 31 stations over longer periods of time.  If we end up needing to use the script for that many stations and components, we may have to modify it to make it run faster.  For now though, I just ran it over all the stations on one component over the selected 1300 second window.  It ended up taking almost two days to run, so I haven't had a chance to work with the data it outputted yet.  Next week I will work through the data, deciding where my cross correlation cut off will be, and determining at what times the high cross correlation occurs.  

I also worked on locating the earthquakes and tremor.  This is the most confusing part of the internship so far, so it's taking me a while to work through it all.  I used the SCEC 3D community velocity model and a 2D grid of data points running across the fault to determine a grid of velocities.  We're hoping to use MacRay to read in this 2D grid and determine relative arrival times at the surface.  We would then use those relative arrival times to determine approximately where the tremor was located.  MacRay is proving problematic, as although a manual and examples were promised with the program download, they were nonexistant.  For a couple days I was trying to figure out how to work it without the manual, because Elizabeth had never worked with it either but it was impossible to even determine what file type my grid would need to be to be read in.  Elizabeth then mentioned that a postdoc student of hers worked with MacRay on my computer, which led to me searching the entire computer for a MacRay manual, and after some digging, I was able to find it!  Although it is not the same version of MacRay that we are using, it was still a start.  Hopefully I can eventually get it working.

Sadly, the surfing trip got cancelled, because not enough people signed up to go.  I should have known better than to sign up for a surf trip the same day as the world cup final.  Hopefully I'll still get to go snorkeling later this month.  I realized today that I am officially halfway done, which is crazy considering I still have a lot of work to do.  Elizabeth and I sat down today and figured out the last four weeks together so I have a plan of attack.  I'm hoping we get everything accomplished and a pretty good poster ready for the conference later this year.