UTEP Facilities for Controlled Source Seismic Operations
The Seismic Source Facility
UTEP hosts the IRIS-Seismic Source Facility. The source facility is primarily a group of personnel with the experience and expertise to conduct any scale of controlled-source seismic experiment, especially crustal-scale seismic experiments. This expertise does not exist in the industrial blasting or seismic communities.
In addition, UTEP owns a large amount of equipment specialized for the drilling, loading, stemming, and shooting of crustal seismic shots. These include caps and plates to secure shot holes before and after they are loaded and stemmed, specialized equipment for loading and stemming and GPS synchronized shooting boxes, which greatly improve the timing accuracy of the shot time.
Facility Inventory
The current inventory includes 1 powder truck (Ford F-350 4X4, with crane and type 3 explosive combination box), 1 20' tandem axle trailer with 2 type 2 and 2 type 5 explosive magazines (all signs and placards included), 6 shooting systems (4 Joule), 3 Verif-i GPS synchronizers (timing devices), 1 Betsy Buffalo Gun (8 and 12 Ga. chambers), 1 Little Beaver auger drill ( HP), 1 TEI rock drill, 380 REFTEK RT125A ditizers with 4.5Hz geophones. SSF can contract other equipment based on experiment needs.
Computer Software
The first processing that seismic data must undergo after being offloaded from the seismic recorders is conversion to a standard format usable by other seismic processing software. UTEP wrote and maintains Texan Streamline Processing (TSP), the most used, most popular and most efficient software available for converting Texan raw data into SEG-Y format. TSP not only does the basic function of converting 3-byte samples to 4-byte samples, it also references samples to input voltage, corrects for clock frequency offset, extracts traces referenced to time zero (the shot time) and loads coordinate information into trace headers. SEG-Y files generated by TSP are immediately usable in seismic processing packages and may even be plotted by seismic plotting packages without additional processing. TSP is a platform and operating system independent program currently running on a variety computers and operating systems both big and little endian including OS X, Linux, Windows, and Sun OS.
