The Montserrat Volcano Observatory Seismic Data Archive

While working as MVO Seismologist from 2000-2003, it became apparent that little effort had been made to secure what was an extremely valuable volcano-seismic dataset, and even less effort had been made to make it accessible to researchers.

The first step was to put in place data acquisition and archival, as following Y2K, there was 50% downtime. Once these initial problems were solved, a major effort was made to recover old data from a hundreds of media which included tracker tapes, CDs, Zip100 disks and DDS-1 DAT tapes (this took hundreds of hours). Hard drive storage capacity was also boosted from around 4GB to 400GB, and then to over 1TB to allow online databases of all raw and derived MVO seismic data to be compiled. Data were also rearchived to higher capacity DDS-3 DAT tapes.

Following my original effort, hardware failures and other problems at MVO twice led to effectively loss of all online seismic data. Proposals I made to have these data securely archived outside of MVO did not go ahead, as it seemed noone was convinced as I was that these data are extremely valuable for long-term scientific research. It seems therefore distinctly possible than in years from now someone might want to ask questions about Montserrat seismicity, and contact the primary organisations involved in monitoring the volcano, only to be told "oh sorry, those data don't exist anymore".

So here is my effort, small though it may be, to archive these data for "science", and at least make the research community aware of what data I have.

Note however, I cannot put raw seismic data online here. Those data are the property of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory and the British Geological Survey. Instead, what I present here are derived data that I automatically generated while at MVO, and during my research work thereafter. However, they are sufficient to show what data exist.