Data Quality Assurance at the IRIS DMC: Expanding and Improving the
MUSTANG System
Abstract
The IRIS Data Management Center (DMC) maintains a large assemblage of
pre-computed and dynamically generated quality assurance metrics for
seismic data by means of its MUSTANG system. Freely accessible through
web services at http://service.iris.edu/mustang, this collection of
measurements includes basic statistics, data latency, data availability,
miniSEED flag counts, Power Spectral Densities (PSD), Probability
Density Functions (PDF), and more. The metrics produced are suitable for
a wide range of uses such as data selection for research projects,
identification of data and metadata problems, assessment of station
health and upgrades, and characterization of environmental noise, among
others. Currently, MUSTANG measurements for seismic channels span our
entire primary data repository from the year 1972 to the present. We are
expanding MUSTANG’s utility to the broader geosciences community by
calculating measurements on our active source, PH5 data repository and
by working towards including other types of data such as infrasound. We
will also present improvements to metric visualization and quality
assessment tools like the MUSTANG Databrowser (basic metric plots and
boxplots), MUSTANGular (map-based metric plots), and ISPAQ (a
stand-alone Python utility for calculating metrics for miniSEED data
stored locally or at any FDSN data center).