PISE: A test and calibration facility dedicated to seismological instrumentation. Feedback on a batch of 110 stations

Abstract

International audienceSeismological projects are increasingly based on a subsequent instrumentation. The trend is clearly toward a network densification and the growth of seismometers parks. This occurs at the international, national and local levels, and concerns both temporary research experiments and permanent observatories. Despite technical constraints specific to each project, they all require detailed monitoring of the status and characteristics of the instrumentation, and an efficient maintenance. We set up a technical platform at the EOST (Ecole et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre (Univ. Strasbourg)): the Seismological Instrumental Platform of EOST (PISE). Using dedicated seismological pillars, we test, validate, calibrate, maintain and monitor over time seismometers and dataloggers characteristics.We use several calibration methods, both relative and absolute. In order to increase the signal to noise ratio, we remotely perform them, while instruments are in quiet conditions on its pillar. For this purpose, we present here our operating mode and some specially developped network devices able to control instrument calibration. As PISE has been chosen as the instrumentation facility of the broad-band French network RESIF, currently under contruction, we already tested and calibrated 110 stations acquired in early 2017. We present here a feed-back on those instruments performances, and their expected dispersions on the whole batch, before field deployment, but also on our calibration procedures, roughly tried out with several operators and a not negligible number of units