XVA1
Varian Creepmeter

Site defunct as of 11/1/17; wire broken/conduit caved due to fault offset;
remediated Feb. 2018

Site can have large seasonal affects...influence by winter rainfall...beware!!


The Sept 28, 2004 Parkfield Earthquake caused the wire to
stretch beyond the limits of the micrometer. (ie, the meter 'pegged')
Released tension on wire by feeding 25mm from the anchor end; Micrometer
read 13.06 mm; then slid anchor end so that micrometer read 4.14 mm.


It appears the both the 'Big Creep' counter gauge and electronics DO NOT
work properly. Counter gauge only shows 16 mm of extension;


November 2006 swap-out electronics and DCP for a new version; Telemetry 
voltage range now 0-5v; scale factor is now 140 counts(mv) per mm 
fault slip (creep).

Nov 28, 2006 -- revised scale factor by 2% after comparing digital data
to aperiodic micrometer measurements. The archival data reflects this change
in scale factor

 
          General Notes:
    FAULT CREEP DATA FROM PARKFIELD

The following data represent real-time measurments of fault slip across
the San Andreas fault or its "south-west" trace near Parkfield, CA.
Creepmeters consists of 2 piers separated by about 30 meters and
connected by an invar wire.  The main fault-trace lies between the 2
piers.  The wire is at roughly a 30 degree angle from the local trace
of the fault. A displacement tranducer measures the change in length of
the wire (or the change in distance between the piers). These
measurements are made once every 10 minutes and are telemetred to Menlo
Park. In addition, micrometer measurements are periodically made by
"hand". The telemetred creep data are reconciled with the micrometer
measurements. The data have been reconciled with the
micrometer measurements and then decimated to daily measurements and
scaled to represent fault slip in mm. 

The data provided here has been processed such that telemetry
glitches have been removed, data edited for electronic and other
problems, offsets due to resets of the instrument have been removed,
and the telemetried data have been reconciled with the Micrometer
measurements.

Please note that when computing secular rates and other statistics that
the assumption of data independence (ie gaussian distributed data) is
NOT correct. For starters, the statistics of the data are a mixture of
random-walk and white (gaussian) noise.  You'll need to construct the
appropriate data covariance matrix to account for these noise sources.
Otherwise, if you let your standard least squares routine compute the
secular rate and its standard error, that error bar will most likely be
too small relative to the true estimate of standard error.

Because the pier are installed at shallow depths (2-3 meters), these
piers will tilt in responce to rainfall. ONE NEEDS TO EXAMINE RAINFALL
RECORDS WHEN INTERPRETING THESE CREEP MEASUREMENTS. 

Many people have contributed to this project including:
Robert Burford
Sandy Schultz
Kate Breckinridge
Rich Liechti

For questions, contact John Langbein (langbein@usgs.gov)
  or Andy Snyder (asnyder@usgs.gov)