Wednesdays from 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm in STB 226
The aim of this series is to hear about the innovative and exciting research that is taking place within our college, thus both faculty and students are encouraged to give a colloquium presentation. Talks should be either 40 - 50 minutes in length for a single presenter colloquium or 20 - 25 minutes in length for a joint colloquium event. If you would like to sign-up to give a CNHS Colloquium Talk, email Efren Ruiz.
For any questions, contact the organizers Heather Kaluna and Efren Ruiz.
Date: 10 September 2025
Speaker: Dr. Thomas Lee, UHH Geology Department
Title: Understanding Legacy Data and Developing Methods for Its Modern Usage
Abstract: Microseism are a ubiquitous feature recorded in seismic data, and exist on records going back for over a century. The main source of microseism is oceanic wave activity, and thus these seismic signals are sensitive to climate-sensitive phenomena such as increases in near-coastal wave-state and changes in the behavior of oceanic storms. The use of modern tools to rescue and digitize old seismic data allows modern quantitative analyses to be performed on them. Such analyses cast valuable light on the oceanic climate of the pre-satellite era. In particular, rescued legacy seismic data for 1936 through 1940 from Harvard, MA, are digitized into usable time series, and instrument corrections derived from earthquake doublets are applied to make comparisons to modern data. For historical and modern data, spectrograms are calculated, instrument responses removed, and microseism signals are extracted. The results are consistent with changes to tropical cyclone behavior in the North Atlantic for the last century; comparison of these results to those using only modern data illustrate the additional information that obtained from historical data. Extraction of such oceanic information from legacy seismic data provides valuable and irreplaceable quantitative data for future climate modeling and verification of hindcasts.