Permanently Instrumented Field Sites

The NEES@UCSB facility consists of permanently instrumented geotechnical test sites designed to improve our understanding of the effects of surface geology on strong ground motion. The instrumentation at these sites includes surface and borehole arrays of accelerometers and pore pressure transducers designed to record strong ground motions, excess pore pressure generation and liquefaction that occurs during large earthquakes. An instrumented structure is also monitored to improve our understanding of soil-foundation-structure interaction (SFSI) effects.

Wildlife Refuge Liquefaction Field Site

The field site at the Imperial Wildlife Refuge

Located in the Imperial Valley of Southern California within the Imperial Wildlife Management Area,the Wildlife Liquefaction Array is a fully instrumented site in an area that has historically produced significant ground motion and liquefaction effects. more

Garner Valley SFSI Field Site

The field site at Garner Valley, near Mt. San Jacinto

The Garner Valley Array is a thoroughly characterized strong motion monitoring site with surface accelerometers, borehole pore pressure transducers and accelerometers, and an extensively instrumented Soil Foundation Structure Interaction (SFSI) test facility. The Garner Valley array records earthquakes on a daily basis, and is also used in active testing experiments. more

News!

Professor Olivia Walling presented the 2010 Engineering Writing Award to four UCSB freshman engineering students for their paper A Transfer Function for the Improvement of Seismic Data Collection. The students worked with strong motion data recorded at the nees@UCSB Wildlife field site, under the supervision of EOT Coordinator Sandy Seale.

Data!

Data Portal:

Access all our data through a our searchable Data Portal. Note: this is a beta version, some features not available in all browsers. Your feeback is welcome.

Searchable Data Portal

Publications:

Published articles and theses written from NEES@UCSB experiments.

Data from the these three other sites shown below have been integrated into the NEES@UCSB data processing.

Borrego Valley Downhole Array

The field site at Borrego Valley

The Borrego Valley field site (BVDA), located near Borrego Springs in southern California, has four borehole instruments at varying depths, and fifteen surface instruments. more

Hollister Downhole Array

The Hollister Earthquake Observatory in central California

The Hollister Earthquake Observatory (HEO) is located near the cities of Hollister and Salinas, in central California. It is located about 10 kilometers from the San Andreas fault, and consists of a vertical array of six accelerometers, and three other accelerometers at a remote site. more

Alaska Delaney Park Array

The Alaska Delaney Park Array

The array at Delaney Park has six boreholes and monitors the historically seismologically active area of downtown Anchorage, Alaska. more

This project is supported by the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers CMS-0217421, CMS-0402490, and CMMI-0927178.

Remote site communications are made possible by the HPWREN program at UC San Diego, NSF grant numbers 0087344 and 0426879