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GSN - Global Seismographic Network

By Earthquake Hazards Program

The Global Seismographic Network is a permanent digital network of state-of-the-art seismological and geophysical sensors connected by a telecommunications network, serving as a multi-use scientific facility and societal resource for monitoring, research, and education.

map of world with symbols for seismic stations
Sources/Usage: Public Domain.
Distribution of Global Seismographic Network (GSN) stations in 2015. (Public domain.)

Formed in partnership among the USGS, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), the GSN provides near-uniform, worldwide monitoring of the Earth, with over 150 modern seismic stations distributed globally. GSN stations are operated by the USGS Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory, the IDA group at UC San Diego, and other affiliate organizations.

Data from the GSN are archived at the IRIS Data Management Center.

GSN Stations
Station data and operational status.

GSN Heliplots
Real-time seismograms from GSN stations

Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory
The mission of the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory (ASL) is to support the operation and maintenance of seismic networks. As part of this mission, the ASL is responsible for the USGS-portion of the Global Seismographic Network (GSN) and the ANSS backbone network.

Data
Waveform data from the GSN and ANSS backbone are transmitted from the station to the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in near-real time, where they are used for rapid earthquake response.

Partners

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Photo Journal: Global Seismographic Network (GSN) Field Engineers Visit the Northernmost Town in the World

In October 2022 GSN field engineers from the Albuquerque Seismic Lab visited the northernmost town in the world, Longyearbyen (Svalbard, Norway) on their way north to GSN station IU-KBS for a station upgrade. GSN station IU-KBS is located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago.
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Photo Journal: Global Seismographic Network (GSN) Field Engineers Visit the Northernmost Town in the World

In October 2022 GSN field engineers from the Albuquerque Seismic Lab visited the northernmost town in the world, Longyearbyen (Svalbard, Norway) on their way north to GSN station IU-KBS for a station upgrade. GSN station IU-KBS is located in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago.
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Achievements and prospects of global broadband seismographic networks after 30 years of continuous geophysical observations

Global seismographic networks (GSNs) emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, facilitated by seminal international developments in theory, technology, instrumentation, and data exchange. The mid- to late-twentieth century saw the creation of the World-Wide Standardized Seismographic Network (1961) and International Deployment of Accelerometers (1976), which advanced global
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An evaluation of the timing accuracy of global and regional seismic stations and networks

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The Global Seismographic Network (GSN) is a multiuse, globally distributed seismic network used by seismologists, to both characterize earthquakes and study the Earth’s interior. Most stations in the network have two collocated broadband seismometers, which enable network operators to identify potential metadata and sensor issues. In this study, we investigate the accuracy with which surface waves
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Rayleigh wave ellipticity measurement uncertainty across the IRIS/USGS and New China Digital Seismograph Networks

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Uncertainty estimates in broadband seismometer sensitivities using microseisms

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Estimating pole/zero errors in GSN-IRIS/USGS network calibration metadata

Mapping the digital record of a seismograph into true ground motion requires the correction of the data by some description of the instrument's response. For the Global Seismographic Network (Butler et al., 2004), as well as many other networks, this instrument response is represented as a Laplace domain pole–zero model and published in the Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data (SEED) forma
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