Iván Rodríguez Rasilla’s research while affiliated with National Autonomous University of Mexico and other places

Mexico is a seismically active country. Earthquakes with magnitudes larger than 7.0 happen, on average, every other year. This fact requires a rapid and consistent response from the national monitoring agency, the Servicio Sismológico Nacional, SSN (Mexican National Seismological Service). For this purpose, in 2014, the SSN created a set of procedures for the daily operations and rapid response called “Protocolo de Respuesta Inmediata ante Sismos Amenazantes” (PRISA, protocol of immediate response to threatening earthquakes). This protocol has been triggered for 292 events with a magnitude larger than or equal to 5.0 that occurred between April 2014 and July 2020. Here we present the response of the SSN, based on this protocol, to three significant earthquakes: the 8 and 19 September 2017 events (Mw 8.2 and 7.1, respectively) and the 23 June 2020 (Mw 7.4). The first two quakes caused severe damage in southern and central Mexico, whereas the third occurred during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and confinement in Mexico. Having PRISA in place contributed to the efficient SSN response in the three events, even though some activities for the 2020 earthquake were performed remotely.

The SISMOMex project represents more than 110 yr of seismological information from Mexico. Its objective is the preservation, search, recovery, systematization, reuse, and dissemination of data and information from the seismograms generated by the Servicio Sismológico Nacional (SSN, National Seismological Service of Mexico) and published material about earthquakes and seismology in Mexico. SISMOMex is the combination of resources in any format (print, electronic, multimedia, and so on) and their corresponding registry in a database and an institutional repository. The database and the repository have an interface for an online search, allowing access to open-access materials, through a link to the electronic resources generated or acquired. The project seeks to preserve for the future all the products generated by the SSN since the beginning of its operations, and organize the “National Seismogram Library” (Sismoteca Nacional en Línea), which is the physical place that stores the seismograms generated by the SSN. Similarly, it allows, under citation, the reuse of the data by interested researchers and students. These seismograms contain unique and unreproducible information. With the project presented here, support is provided mainly to the scientific community, by directing the search of historical and present data and information on the seismic activity of Mexico to a single place.

Xyoli Pérez-Campos et al. report on the Servicio Sismológico Nacional in Mexico for the Summary of the Bulletin of the ISC.

The Servicio Sismológico Nacional (SSN, Mexican National Seismological Service) has a history of 107 yrs. In the last 13 yrs, the SSN has gone through a significant modernization process, involving the installation of new broadband stations with colocalized accelerometers, seismometers, and Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. New collaborations with other Mexican regional networks helped increase the number of stations from which the SSN receives data. In this article, we present the current backbone broadband network configuration; data flow from the stations to the automatic and manual publication of the earthquake location and magnitude; and the seismic catalog, which includes more than 105,000 events since 1900. A clear example of the successful performance of this network is the recording of the 8 September 2017 Mw 8.2 earthquake, located in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. We present the signals of 52 of the 63 SSN broadband stations that recorded the event in real time. This earthquake represents the largest recorded in Mexico by a comprehensive national network.