Distributed Acoustic Sensing and Seismic data from SISSLE experiment at Alpine Fault, New Zealand, 2023

The distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and seismological data in this collection are part of SISSLE (South Island Seismology at the Speed of Light Experiment) near Haast, South Island, New Zealand which aims to characterize the Alpine Fault structure and earthquake locations. The data are collected along State Highway 6, which crosses the Alpine Fault, in two phases between February and November 2023 for a total duration of 120 days.The DAS data were measured in strain rate using a Silixa iDAS2 interrogator with a fixed gauge length of 10 m. The DAS data were initially sampled at 1 kHz and later downsampled to 50 Hz for computational efficiency. There are 7488 channels in total, recorded over a distance of about 30 km with a nominal spatial sampling of 4 m.

Specifically, this data collection is made accessible as part of open research to reproduce analysis and figures for "Unsupervised Coherent Noise Removal from Seismological Distributed Acoustic Sensing Data" (Konietzny et al., 2024), which applies machine learning techniques to effectively remove unwanted, structured coherent noise from DAS data. The data selected contain minute-long time series of local and teleseismic earthquake data, and traffic data. For more details on the earthquakes, refer to the appendix in Konietzny et al. (2024).

The DAS and seismic deployment and data collection was enabled in part by AuScope and the Australian Government via the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). The entire data collection from the experiment are embargoed until January 2026. The entire distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data will be shared through the 2030 Geophysics Collections project and hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Seismic nodal data (network code ‘2B’) and its metadata can be accessed via AusPass, an International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) data center, dedicated to the acquisition, management, and distribution of passive seismological data in Australia and its periphery.