A Time for the Advanced National Seismic System

In his address to the Seismological Society of America at our Annual Meeting in Victoria last April, U.S. Geological Survey Director Charles (Chip) Groat gave us renewed confidence that the time for the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) to move from promise to reality is now. As most of you know, the ANSS will be a nationwide network of 7,000 seismographs and strong-motion instruments, both on the ground and in buildings, that will provide scientists and engineers with the digital-quality data that are so desperately needed to understand ground-motion and building-response processes. ANSS is also critical for emergency response, providing real-time information on the distribution and severity of earthquake shaking. ANSS will replace the inadequate and antiquated 30-year-old seismographic equipment that forms the backbone of most regional networks. [S]ignificant funding for ANSS has never been part of the President's budget request. The blueprint for ANSS is laid out in USGS Circular 1188, submitted to Congress in 1999 in response to a 1997 law (Public Law 105-47) that called for USGS to “provide for the assessment of regional seismic monitoring networks in the United States”, including “the need to update the infrastructures used for collecting seismological data for research and monitoring of seismic events in the U.S.” The ANSS plan is a consensus document, the product of a series of workshops on the nation's seismic monitoring needs. Preparation of the ANSS plan, and ultimately its implementation, involves not only USGS but also the entire seismic monitoring community, as well as the user communities. In an unprecedented show of unity, the seismological, engineering, and emergency-response communities from the local to the national levels all came together to forge the ANSS vision as laid down in Circular 1188. The ANSS plan requires a capital expenditure of $170 million in new equipment over a …