The University of Hawai’i at Hilo College of Natural and Health Science Colloquium Series

Talks In Fall 2025


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.


8 October 2025

Speakers: Dr. Karla McDermid Smith and Dr. Grady Weyenberg, UHH Marine Science Department and UHH Math/Data Science Departments

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA


15 October 2025

Speaker: Dr. Matthew L. Knope, UH Manoa School of Life Sciences

Title: TBA

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22 October 2025

Speaker: TBA

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29 October 2025

Speakers: Dr. Norman Arancon, UHH College of Agriculture, Forestry & Natural Resource Management

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA