What to expect from the PASSCAL Magnetotelluric facility

Date/Time & Location

Wednesday, October 9th from 11-12 PM in the Galleria North Room

Conveners

Ninfa Bennington, UW-Madison
Andy Frassetto, IRIS

Abstract

Magnetotelluric observations provide complimentary information to seismic observations at similar resolutions and scales. Deployments of MT instruments often have more flexibility, less logistical considerations, and shorter durations than many types of seismic surveys, but they also contain their own challenges. Following the success of the EarthScope magnetotelluric program, the NSF SAGE facility award will establish a new pool of MT instruments at the PASSCAL Instrument Center for Principal Investigators. The PIC will provide support for field deployments using modern instrumentation and dirt-to-desktop dataflows. We anticipate that the PIC capacity to serve PIs interested in magnetotellurics will be fully established by October 1, 2020, and the pool of instruments will be procured through at least 2022. In this SIG, we will preview what this facility will provide, report the status of our progress towards this during the first year of SAGE-2, share results of a community survey on facility priorities, and present examples of portable MT experiments and science results that demonstrate the potential for this new facility. We will also update on the continued efforts to complete the EarthScope MT Transportable Array across the Lower-48 U.S.