Assistant Specialist - Berkeley Seismological Lab

University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) seeks a researcher to advance new earthquakes solutions and products. You will analyze state-of-the-art approaches for real-time earthquake parameters and develop enhanced data pipelines for timely public alerts.

You will explore machine-learning methods, integrate diverse datasets, validate results across many earthquakes, and contribute to peer-reviewed publications while improving the ComCat-driven catalog infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Review state-of-the-art approaches to produce earthquake parameters and products in real time.
• Research and develop new customized earthquakes solutions and products, including ML and new datasets.
• Validate the accuracy of produced solutions and products across diverse earthquakes.
• Lead or contribute to peer-reviewed papers on newly developed solutions and products.
• Research methods to compute amplitude/travel time corrections for BSL stations.

Skills

Machine learning

Seismology

Data analysis

Tools

ComCat

USGS data

Job description

The Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) conducts essential research on earthquakes and solid earth processes while collecting and delivering high-quality geophysical data. It provides robust earthquake and hazard information including real-time alerts to the public, in collaboration with our partners. It also enables the broad consumption of earthquake information by everyone while educating and training students at all levels and from all backgrounds.

The BSL is responsible for publishing all earthquake products in Northern California to the Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (ComCat), a live database and long-term archive run by the USGS. The BSL is in the process of modernizing this pipeline with the goal of delivering new advanced and high-quality solutions and products.

The main goal of this position is to perform the necessary research to develop and provide new earthquakes solutions and products.

The research duties for this position include:

• Review state-of-the-art approaches to produce earthquake parameters (e.g. relocation, different types of magnitudes) and products (e.g. ShakeMaps, Moment Tensors, double-difference solutions) in real time as well as to push and archive earthquakes solutions (e.g. PDL, catalog archiver, waveform archiver, etc)
• Research and develop new customized earthquakes solutions and products, including through the use of machine-learning techniques and integration of new types of datasets (e.g. distributed acoustic arrays)
• Validate the accuracy of the produced solutions and products on a diverse range of earthquakes sequences. Fine-tune the configuration when needed
• Lead or contribute to peer-reviewed papers on these newly developed earthquakes solutions and products
• Research different methods to compute amplitude/travel time corrections and compute these coefficients for all BSL stations