Goals and Mission: Within the GFZ, Section 2.4 provides core seismological competence and infra-structure. A reliable assessment of the earthquake hazard requires a fundamental understanding of the underlying geodynamic processes. We examine these on a lithospheric scale by application and development of seismological methods for imaging the upper mantle and crust. We also locate and characterise seismicity on a local and regional scale as a marker of stress and deformation processes.
We run a program, GEOFON, with which we seek to facilitate cooperation in seismological research and earthquake and tsunami hazard mitigation by operating a global network of stations, by providing rapid transnational access to seismological data and source parameters of large earthquakes, by keeping these data accessible in the long term and by developing and distributing communication and processing software. Mitigation of the effects of major earthquakes by early warning from tsunamis and the provision of prompt information for governmental agencies, NGOs, the media and the general public requires rapid determination of earthquake parameters. We develop methods for the fast automatic location and determination of magnitude and other parameters (moment tensor, rupture propagation), and provide a bulletin for all major earthquakes.

wiki of section 2.4

direction and locations

The GEOFON program consists of a seismic network (GE Network) with global coverage, a seismological data centre (GEOFON DC) and a global seismic monitoring system (GEOFON EQinfo). These three pillars are part of the MESI research infrastructure of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. aiming at facilitating research in seismology. GEOFON provides real-time seismic data, access to its own and third party data from our archive facilities as well as global and rapid earthquake information. The GEOFON seismological software development effort can be considered the fourth module of the GEOFON Program. Among the software we provide to the community is the SeisComP3 package that we use for all our operations. Data, services, products and software openly distributed by GEOFON are used daily by hundreds of users and data centres worldwide.

GEOFON