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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Scramble to salvage data from sensors -GS Mudur

Scramble to salvage data from sensors -GS Mudur

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published Published on May 1, 2015   modified Modified on May 1, 2015
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Scientists are now scrambling to retrieve whatever data they can from a network of 293 ground motion sensors in cities and towns across northern and eastern India that was offline and cut off from the research community during the Nepal earthquakes.

The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the earth sciences ministry will send a team to retrieve any records of ground acceleration from instruments in Uttarakhand, while the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, will independently dispatch teams to Bengal, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Earthquake engineers at IIT Roorkee had set up the network between 2005 and 2008, and operated it until September 2014 when the earth sciences ministry stopped funds for the network's maintenance.

The ministry informed IIT Roorkee in February that the NCS would take charge of the instruments - and yet email exchanges between researchers suggest the NCS did not actually seek access to any of the instruments until the weekend quakes, The Telegraph had reported today.

"We're trying to manually retrieve any data that may have been recorded during the earthquakes," a senior faculty member at IIT Roorkee said. Researchers are hoping that some of the instruments have remained functional despite several months without routine maintenance.

The instruments called accelerometers - located in most district headquarters across northern, eastern and northeastern states - are designed to record the ground-shaking at each site during earthquakes and serve a purpose quite different from seismographs.

While seismographs are highly sensitive instruments used to quickly determine the magnitude and epicentre of earthquakes, engineers say they are more interested in how the ground behaves at specific sites at different distances from the epicentre.

"The accelerometers can tell us how exactly the ground moved at each site during a quake," said S.T.G. Raghukanth, associate professor of civil engineering at IIT Madras, who is among users of the network.

"It's unfortunate - when we most needed it, the network was offline," Raghukanth told this newspaper.

The energy released by an earthquake at its epicentre gets attenuated as it moves through intervening rock, soil and groundwater to shake the ground, buildings, and other structures in distant cities. There may be significant variations in ground behaviour from site to site, even within a city.

Civil and structural engineers can use ground behaviour studies to analyse how buildings will respond to distant earthquakes. Seismologists can also use data from ground motion sensors to understand in great detail the mechanisms of the earthquake at the epicentre.

When IIT Roorkee operated the network, it had leased lines from BSNL to conduct routine health-checks of the accelerometers and to remotely receive data. But as the NCS was preparing to take over, and IIT Roorkee had no funds to pay for leased lines, the institute lost connectivity to the instruments.

Researchers recall that the network had provided useful ground motion measurements during the 6.9 magnitude Sikkim earthquake on September 18, 2011, that had damaged buildings and structures and caused deaths in Sikkim, Bihar and Bengal.

The Telegraph, 1 May, 2015, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150501/jsp/nation/story_17692.jsp#.VULu-ZNr9v0


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