THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST SEISMIC NETWORK AND EARTHQUAKE HAZARD MITIGATION

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) mission is to provide data and information products to help scientists study Pacific Northwest seismic and volcanic hazards and to assist emergency managers, the press and public to understand and mitigate those hazards. From our home at the University of Washington, we continually monitor the signals from hundreds of seismometers across Oregon and Washington.

Historically, we have reported on earthquakes as soon as accurate information is in hand. Today we are continuing that tradition with ever greater accuracy, speed, and with a variety of targeted products. We supply volcano seismicity information to the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory, seismograms to NOAA for tsunami monitoring, and are the authoritative source of regional earthquake data and information for the Advanced National Seismic System.

In the last couple of years we have embarked on an ongoing process of upgrading PNSN field instrumentation, computer hardware, and software.

We will review the fundamental tools with which we notify emergency managers and the public about earthquakes, reporting within 10 minutes. The most rapid reports include simply magnitude and location, and, if the earthquake's magnitude is larger than 2.9, soon followed by maps of shaking measured instrumentally and as perceived by humans and finally information that puts each earthquake in the context of the tectonic framework and with relation to past earthquakes in the area.