Permanent broadband network – RLBP

The permanent broadband network (RLBP) is one of Résif’s specific actions.

An action launched at the very beginning of the 21st century

At the beginning of the 2000s, the democratization of high-bandwidth and high-dynamic sensors enabled a greater variety of analyses. This led the French seismological community to propose the creation of a true mainland “broadband” network following on from the example of such networks developed in several European countries and, indeed, worldwide (including the Geoscope network).

The Permanent Broadband Network (RLBP) was officially labelled as a National Observation Service (SNO in French – See the “Organization” page) by CNRS-Insu in 2007. It includes eight Observatories of the Sciences of the Universe (OSU) as well as the CEA’s Geophysical Detection Laboratory and is coordinated by Eost in Strasbourg.

…which led to the creation of the Résif research infrastructure itself

The need to develop the RLBP partly led to the creation of the Résif Research Infrastructure which now works on this network as a specific action. The objective of the RLBP for 2022 within the framework of Résif is to build a network of about 190 stations covering the whole territory but with increased density in the most seismic areas. This density of stations will significantly improve our knowledge of the deep structure as well as our estimation of seismic hazards in France by lowering the magnitude of completeness to less than 2 over the whole territory. The action’s objective is also for this network to be used as a true seismological surveillance tool for long durations particularly through its integration into the Epos infrastructure’s European virtual network.

The RLBP also aims to provide very high quality data. This involves selecting isolated sites to limit seismic noise generated by human activity and carefully installing seismometers to limit the influence of environmental parameters (temperature, pressure, wind) on the low frequencies of the signals. It also involves implementing various tools and procedures to provide the most complete time series possible along with accurate, continuously updated metadata.

The RLBP data are managed by the A-RLBP node of the Résif information system, jointly steered by the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur (OCA) and Eost.

Key numbers

In 2021, the RLBP had 169 permanent Resif stations, and 19 associated external stations. All these stations collected in 2021 more than 2.4 TB of data, for a total volume of 16.5 TB of data made available to the scientific community.

To know more about Résif-RLBP

• Résif-RLBP web site
• Synthetic card (jpg format – french only version © CNRS-INSU)