Automated Quality Assessment of Interferometric Ring Laser Data.

Area of Science:

• Seismology and geophysics.
• Advancements in optical instrumentation for Earth sciences.

Background:

• Recent decades show increased efforts to observe all 12 degrees of seismic ground motion, including translational, strain, and rotational components.
• Large-scale ring laser installations like ROMY (ROtational Motion in seismologY) have emerged as key tools for geoscientific applications.
• Heterolithic ring laser structures, such as ROMY, are susceptible to optical frequency drifts, necessitating novel data handling approaches.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present an automated approach for assessing the data quality and performance of ring laser systems.
• To apply this scheme to ROMY data for detecting operational issues and assigning quality flags.

Main Methods:

• Development of an automated quality assessment scheme based on the characteristics of the interferometric Sagnac signal.
• Application of the developed scheme to data from the ROMY (ROtational Motion in seismologY) ring laser array.

Main Results:

• The automated scheme successfully detects compromised operation states in the ROMY ring laser.
• Quality flags are assigned to data, enabling identification of reliable measurements.

Conclusions:

• The developed automated approach provides a robust method for quality control of ring laser data.
• This quality assessment will be crucial for ensuring data integrity once the ROMY database is publicly accessible.