Are We Ready for the Great Flood of USArray?
On the up side, in some ways, we are. Real-time systems exist to transport these data from the field to data archive centers. IRIS, the U.S. and other national networks, and various regional networks do have experience doing quick quality control on substantial volumes of data. Advances in data storage will allow us to archive these data relatively painlessly. Thus, we are ready to receive this data, check it quickly, and file it away. Then what? One only needs to read past ES columns to realize that we are a community that loves to get up close and personal with individual seismograms. And we love to write software to do these tasks. The ES column has many examples of people doing interesting things with small volumes of data using their own software. Can we continue in this mode of operation? If we continue to painstakingly analyze individual seismograms then we may severely underutilize this rich new data source. On the other hand, if we bounce from seismogram to seismogram and neve
