ABSTRACT

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a technology allowing one to repurpose a fiber optic cable as a series of many vibration sensors. DAS allows geoscientists and civil engineers to collect seismic vibration data more easily and at low cost, to opportunistically use telecommunications infrastructure, to leave sensors in place for long-term studies with little maintenance, and to collect data in new locations such as glaciers, cities, and offshore environments. DAS could transform approaches to numerous societally important problems: environmental monitoring, groundwater studies, earthquake hazard analysis, infrastructure resilience monitoring, and other applications requiring high resolution vibration data across large regions. However, the scientific and societal benefits of these DAS-enabled applications will only become reality if appropriate user-friendly software is freely available to scientists and engineers. This Geoinformatics Catalytic Track project will develop new software, the Distributed Acoustic Sensing Data Analysis Ecosystem (DASDAE), to lower the barrier to entry for the growing community of scientists working with DAS. DASDAE will provide convenient programming interfaces to read/write DAS file formats and for analyzing and visualizing data. The DASDAE team will build a user and developer community by organizing tutorial workshops, distributing training videos and notebooks (i.e., documents that mix text explanations, computer code, and images), and hosting hackathons. This project will support cross-disciplinary training for diverse students and postdocs, including through use of software in course materials.

Large DAS data volumes and ongoing development of data standards have created a barrier for many geoscientists wishing to use DAS in their research projects. Without an open-source community software package to complement investments in DAS instrumentation, the data acquired are unlikely to be fully utilized. DASDAE will be an open-source software development environment for the geoscience community to collaborate, share methods, access open data, and efficiently reproduce results from DAS experiments. It will be integral to new geoscience discoveries, particularly for disciplines that rarely use large-scale seismic data. DASDAE will include a broad suite of DAS data analysis tools, implemented for dense arrays with modern software optimizations, integration with existing open-source computational science software for array analysis where appropriate, and robust testing and verification practices. This software will follow a modular design to allow for reuse of code across computing paradigms: field laptops, desktop workstations, high performance computing (HPC) clusters, and future cloud and edge computing. The DASDAE team will develop three scientific analysis modules that advance earthquake hazard, smart city, and near-surface geophysics related research, which also serve as examples for future software development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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