The SCSN's primary mission is to produce an accurate earthquake catalog for Southern California. Data Center opened at Caltech. The SCEC Data Center provides earthquake data to researchers over the internet. This network is referred to here as Caltech's digital seismic network.
Seismic stations measure the ground motion at a specific location.
The data are converted from the analog signal produced from the ground motion into digital information that computers are capable of understanding and manipulating. The difference between networks with analog stations and networks with digital stations is the point at which the analog signal is converted into digital information. This means that the analog signal must be sent, in our case over phone lines, from each station to the central site. Each station's signal is then converted from analog to digital by hardware and processed by computers. Signals from analog stations go off-scale quickly because the electronics and analog phone lines have limited dynamic range.