Imperial Valley Dark Fiber Project (IVDF): Brawley EQ Cluster Catalog And DAS Event Dataset

The Imperial Valley Dark Fiber (IVDF) project deployed a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) interrogator on a pre-existing dark fiber cable running ~28 km
between Calipatria and Imperial, California, passing through the Brawley Geothermal Field and surrounding Brawley Seismic Zone in Southern California. DAS measurements provided a dense array of ~6,900 virtual sensors along the cable with a mean channel spacing of approximately 4 m (described in Ajo-Franklin et al., 2022, linked below).

This dataset contains waveform recordings of 16 local seismic events from a ~3-hour swarm-like sequence that occurred on May 14, 2021, in the Brawley Seismic Zone. Six events were identified in the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) catalog; the remaining ten were detected using the DAS array. All 16 events are located on a strike-slip fault (strike ~222 deg., dip ~80deg.) within a compact rupture zone of ~0.5 km diameter at depths of approximately 8.9-9.4 km, with local magnitudes ranging from ML 0.78 to 2.03. Hypocenters were determined on the fault plane by cross-correlation of DAS channel waveforms, referenced to event 14 (ML 1.22). The accompanying README provides general data informaiton, as well as naming and content descriptions of each file. Event origin times, locations, and magnitudes are provided in the accompanying catalog file (catalog_DASreloc_222-80_20210514.csv).

Organization: Department of Energy
Organization URL: https://catalog.data.gov/organization/energy
Last updated: 2026-04-12T16:16:08Z
Tags: Brawley Field, Brawley Seismic Zone, DAS, Distributed Acoustic Sensing, Earthquake, Fiber Optic Sensing, HDF5, Imperial Valley, SCSN, Salton Sea, Seismicity, Southern California Seismic Network, energy, event catalog, geophysics, geothermal, processed data, raw data, swarm, waveform recordings