TCS Seismology Consortium 

Consortium Governance and Coordination

ORFEUS, EMSC, EFEHR, ETH

Chair(s)

Lars Ottemöller (ORFEUS)

The TCS Seismology Consortium was formally established in October 2019.

EPOS Seismology Consortium Assembly

The EPOS Seismology Consortium Assembly consists of up to three representatives from each member (ORFEUS, EMSC, EFEHR) plus up to three community representatives. The European Seismological Commission (ESC) is invited to the Assembly as Observer. 

A Chair of EPOS Seismology is elected from among the member representatives (currently Lars Ottemoeller, ORFEUS). The Consortium may nominate a Secretary to support the activities of the Consortium, who is independent of the members (currently Florian Haslinger, ETH Zurich).

Internal Organisation and Governance

EPOS Seismology relies heavily on the community-driven European level institutions that are already established. These organisations are built on membership of national academic institutions working in seismology, as well as relevant governmental agencies. These national infrastructures are the main providers of data and products to EPOS-Seismology.

The historic development and current scope of the European level institutions reflect on first order also the data processing chain, with access to waveform data and associated services being organised under the umbrella of ORFEUS, Seismological Products within the context of EMSC together with the pre-instrumental data provided by AHEAD, and seismic hazard and risk information is handled by the EFEHR consortium. High-resolution 3D waveform modelling, as the first application of Computational Seismology, is currently addressed by ORFEUS in the waveform pillar.

Each of the existing European level institutions has its own governance structure that addresses how member organizations are represented, how they participate in the decision making processes, and how duties and responsibilities are assigned. The main governance tasks on the level of EPOS Seismology are to ensure the coordination among the pillars, and to represent EPOS Seismology within EPOS. To look after these tasks a very slim EPOS Seismology Consortium has been developed, where together with the three pillars also the seismological scientific user community is represented.

European Services and national contributions

Except for the overall EPOS Seismology governance, all services provided by EPOS Seismology are organized within the three pillars. Here, the national infrastructures play a crucial role as providers of data and products, which are then distributed through the common European level services. All the national member institutions of ORFEUS, EMSC and EFEHR are key contributors to EPOS.

ORFEUS coordinates the seismic waveforms data and products collected and developed by more than 60 national or regional observatories. The federated European Integrated Data Archive EIDA is operated jointly by the participating EIDA nodes hosted by national infrastructures. Other waveform related services are provided by the ORFEUS Data Centre ODC hosted at KNMI, like the Rapid Raw Strong Motion (RRSM) system and the European StationBook. INGV Milano operates the Engineering Strong Motion (ESM) system.

EMSC 's main mission is the rapid collection and dissemination of parametric earthquake information from its 76 member institutions. The EMSC Secretariat, hosted by the CEA, is the central infrastructure which operates the majority of EMSC services on behalf of the members. Key nodal members have special tasks within the EMSC. Historical Earthquake information is provided by AHEAD, a consortium of twelve national institutions, with the central office hosted by INGV in Milan.

EFEHR was recently established as a Consortium following European projects addressing the provision and coordination of seismic hazard and risk data, products and services. These projects involved a large number of national academic institutions working in this field, and/or in charge of providing seismic hazard information on a national level. The EFEHR Consortium is currently chaired by GFZ Potsdam, and ETH Zurich, GFZ, INGV, and EUCENTRE are currently providing specific services related to European seismic hazard and risk.