The NEIC was transferred to Boulder, Colorado, in 1972 and made part of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1973. The NEIC was moved again in 1974 to its present location in Golden, Colorado.
The National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC), a part of the Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, is located in Golden, Colorado, 10 miles west of Denver. The NEIC has three main missions. First, the NEIC determines, as rapidly and as accurately as possible, the location and size of all significant earthquakes that occur worldwide. The NEIC disseminates this information immediately to concerned national and international agencies, scientists, critical facilities, and the general public. Second, the NEIC collects and provides to scientists and to the public an extensive seismic database that serves as a solid foundation for scientific research, principally through the operation of modern digital national and global seismograph networks and through cooperative international agreements. The NEIC is the national data center and archive for earthquake information. Third, the NEIC pursues an active research program to improve its ability to locate earthquakes and to understand the earthquake mechanism. These efforts are all aimed at mitigating the risks of earthquakes to mankind; and they are made possible by the fine international cooperation that has long characterized the science of seismology.
ORFEUS is the non-profit foundation to coordinate and promote digital, broadband seismology in the European-Mediterranean area.
EIDA is the European Integrated Data Archive infrastructure within ORFEUS to provide access to seismic waveform data in European archives.
To monitor earthquake and volcanic activity across the Pacific Northwest, the University of Washington and the University of Oregon cooperatively operate the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). The PNSN is sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the U.S. Department of Energy, the State of Washington, and the State of Oregon. Beginning in 1969 with five seismometers, the PNSN has grown to more than 300 seismograph stations distributed across the region and become the second largest seismic network in the United States. The PNSN is an organization dedicated to reducing impacts of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the states of Washington and Oregon by providing accurate and fast information about earthquakes and ground motions to scientists, engineers, planners, and the public.
Our headquarters is at the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. However, we have offices and personnel in several locations in the region, seismic stations spread far and wide over the two states, and deep collaborations with other institutions inside and outside of Cascadia that make it a bit of a challenge to define sharply our organizational boundaries.
The Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM), Dziewonski and Anderson (1981) , is a standard model for the structure of the Earth, from the center to the surface, defining the main parameters and principal discontinuities.
With the increasing reliability of the details in elastic global models, it may be possible, in the near future, to accurately predict elastic effects on the amplitudes of globally traveling long period surface and body waves, thereby gaining access to more accurate estimates of the lateral variations of Q in the earth.
Images of Q model at four different depths
These seismogram displays depict ground motion recorded by seismograph stations in real-time, updated every few minutes. Each plot represents 24 hours of data from one station.
This web page will host the new Reference Earth Model.