Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a transformative technology and its applications in geosciences and engineering are numerous and growing. To move this frontier technology forward, it is important to compare and integrate measurements across deployments and make the data reusable by others following Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). Long-standing metadata standards such as the Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data (SEED) (Ahern et al., 2009) developed for seismic data do not adapt well for DAS due to fundamental differences in sensor and data acquisition parameters. Existing formats for seismic metadata developed in the early days of digital seismic recording, such as dataless SEED and SEG-Y headers, cannot accommodate all the acquisition parameters, cable environment, and channel location information needed for proper characterization.
Here, DAS-RCN Data Management Working Group presents DAS metadata standard (v1.1.0), specifically for DAS research community to facilitate the integration of DAS measurements across experiments and increase reusability. This standard V1.1.0 (improved from V1.0.0) fully describes the five key components of a DAS experiment: interrogator, data acquisition, channels, cable, and fiber. The intent is that this metadata standard should be independent of the specific implementation and the emphasis is on the content and structure (i.e., schema). This also implies that the metadata is independent of the time-series data.
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• v1.1.0 (Sep 21, 2023): Updated DAS metadata schema. \ Key changes include creating separate child branch for Cable (and fiber), and for Interrogator (and Acquisition, Channel Group, and Channel). \ • v1.0.0 (Aug 24, 2022): This is the first release of the DAS Metadata Reporting Format
The DAS-RCN Reporting Format for DAS metadata is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CCby4).
The team (Voon Hui Lai, Kathleen Hodgkinson, Robert Porritt, Robert Mellors) would like to thank all who provided input and in particular, members of the DAS RCN Metadata working group: Jonathan Ajo-Franklin; Kent Anderson; Sandra Barajas; Paul Bodin; Jerry Carter; Luigia Cristiano; Ben Evans; Ge Jin; Meghan Miller; Helle Pedersen; Javier Quinteros; Nigel Rees; Diane Rivet; Jonathan Schaeffer; Nicole Taverna; Chad Trabant; Arantza Ugalde; Antonio Villaseñor; Jon Weers; Ray Willemann; Lesley Wyborn; Nate Lindsey; Zack Spica; Andreas Wuestefeld. We would also like to specially acknowledge Dan Auerbach, Marius Isken, Julián Pelaez, Earthscope Consortium (formally IRIS) Data Management Center for their extensive input and suggestions in improving this metadata standard.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.
KMH and RWP were supported by the Source Physics Experiment. The Source Physics Experiment (SPE) would not have been possible without the support of many people from several organizations. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the National Nuclear Security Administration, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development (DNN R&D), and the SPE working group, a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers.
Voon Hui Lai, Kathleen M. Hodgkinson, Robert W. Porritt, Robert Mellors; Toward a Metadata Standard for Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) Data Collection. Seismological Research Letters 2024;; 95 (3): 1986–1999. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220230325
If you have trouble accessing the manuscript, please reach out to Voon (voonhui.lai@anu.edu.au).