An old seismogram becomes much more useful when we know which station recorded it, how the instrument responded, and which clock and channel the trace belongs to. I have worked on recovering eruption records from Soufrière Hills on Montserrat, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, Popocatépetl in Mexico, and Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia.
Soufrière Hills, Montserrat
Our team recovered and digitized recordings from the observatory’s analog seismic network covering July 1995 to December 2004. These records let researchers revisit the early eruption, including periods before the digital network was available. The Montserrat recovery paper describes the archive and how we reconstructed it.
Mount Pinatubo, Philippines
The 1991 Pinatubo seismic network dataset makes historical observations available for reuse. Converting traces into a readable format is one step. Reconstructing station metadata and identifying gaps are what allow another researcher to interpret them.
Popocatépetl and Nevado del Ruiz
These volcanoes are also part of my seismic data rescue work. Across the projects, recovery has meant reading DDS tapes, Zip disks, and floppy disks, then decoding the files they contain. I use miniSEED for waveforms, StationXML for station and instrument metadata, and QuakeML for event information. Organizing waveform files in SeisComP Data Structure (SDS) archives makes it possible to retrieve records by station, channel, and date.