UW seismologists expand stadium monitoring for NFC championship game
University of Washington - The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network's installed a third seismograph at CenturyLink Field this week in the wake of the Seattle Seahawks win over the New Orleans Saints last weekend that provided a trial by fire of the network's website and new monitoring tools. Before last weekend's game, network scientists set up two near real-time seismic monitors at CenturyLink to augment data from a third seismograph about a block away. Together they provided a scientific measurement of the energy of Seahawks' "12th man” - the fans - and the most difficult real-life test for the recently redesigned website, pnsn.org , as fans inundated the site. "I was watching the traffic from the CenturyLink Field press box and saw the web slow way down as tens of thousands of requests for seismograms were arriving almost simultaneously,” said Jon Connolly, a seismic network software engineer. "I was able to tune and rebalance how the requests were managed and we learned a lot about how to reorganize some services to be ready for the next big earthquake or volcanic eruption. Those seismograms, dubbed " Hawk-O-Grams ,” were so popular that Steve Malone, a UW professor emeritus of Earth and space sciences, had to shut down his experimental "Fan-O-Meter,” which combined the three stations' outputs in a streaming graph that was almost synchronized with the TV broadcast delay. "Folks were getting bounced out after a few minutes or could not see the display at all when the servers became overwhelmed by the demand,” Malone said.
