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EBD at Garner Valley, CA Aug 15-21 2004

Background

Garner Valley has been monitored for about 15 years by UCSB, due to its fault proximity and alluvial soil. It presents a nice opportunity to instrument basin soil conditions similar to those in many populous cities. For this collaborative experiment, the T-Rex shaker truck from UT was used to shake the earth at 18 sites throughout the valley, while the USGS and UCSB people measured the results with local and distributed sensors. Secondary efforts included the CENS self-organizing wireless sensor networks, a grand opening with ribbon-cutting by Marta Brown and presentations to a busload of students.

Information on the site and seismology can be found at http://www.crustal.ucsb.edu/observatories/gvda/ and http://www.crustal.ucsb.edu/observatories/nees/Index.php.

Also, please see http://nees.ucsb.edu/projects/ for more information on the project in general.

This (PDF) presentatation on the experiment is well worth a read as both introduction and background.

News coverage

  • San Bernadino Sun - "Students feel latest quake research"
  • The Desert Sun - "Scientists move in for the 'big one'"
  • The Press-Enterprise - "Monster truck has good vibrations"
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    Demo movies

    These are a series of movies that I shot using our Sony DSC-V1 camera. This is a 5 megapixel camera we bought for JCamera/PTP testing which turned out to have inadquate PTP support. However, it can capture MPEG1 movies of any length, limited only by the size of the 'Memory Stick' in the camera.

    All of these are as they came off the camera, no editing or format conversions performed. All are VGA (640x480), 25fps, with audio.

    1. MOV00478.MPG, 4.1MB, 12", T-Rex in vertical actuation.
    2. MOV00479.MPG, 4.1MB, 12", T-Rex in longitudinal motion.
    3. MOV00480.MPG, 2.3MB, 7", wide-angle shot of T-Rex.

    Remote particpation during the experiment

    Scott Gose and myself, with the assistance of Ben Clifford at ISI, set up a Polycom webcast of the speeches, and also video from the sites' permanently mounted telepresence camera. I also attempted to get streaming data configured, so that remote participants could observe it as well, but had problems with the orb2nsds code Steve at UCLA is going to get me a set of manuals so I can finish orb2nsds off once and for all; it was very frustrating to have unrepairable code.

    You can see the now-outdated instruction page I wrote at this location.

    Pictures

    Due to the number of pictures, I've put them on a separate page. It's a mixed lot; equipment, people, setup, shake sites, some scenery. All taken with the same Sony camera.

    Pictures page (generated with iPhoto).

    Navigation links

  • Back to NEESGrid at Argonne
  • Back to home page
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    Support

    This work was supported primarily by the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number CMS-0117853.