Faculty/Staff

von Seggern, David

Status: Emeritus, Network Manager

David von Seggern, Ph. D., Emeritus

Nevada Seismological Laboratory, U. Nevada-Reno

775-303-8461

vonseg1@sbcglobal.net, vonseg@seismo.unr.edu

Education:

B. S., major in geophysics, St. Louis U. 1966

M. S., major in geophysics, U. Hawaii, 1967

Ph. D., seismology, Pennsylvania State U., 1983

Work Experience:

1967 to 1982: I was employed as a seismic analyst and as a research seismologist studying underground nuclear tests at the Seismic Research Laboratory (Teledyne Geotech, Alexandria VA). I made contributions in the areas of detection, location, and discrimination of these events.

1982-1992: I worked in 3-D imaging and in computer program development to support exploration efforts for oil and gas deposits at Phillips Petroleum Co., Bartlesville OK. I was involved there with state-of-the-art Kirchhoff imaging on Cray computers and with modeling of seismic wave propagation.

1992-2005: I was the Seismic Network Manager for the UNR seismic studies at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the designated repository for high-level nuclear waste, overseeing the operational aspects of the seismic monitoring, handling the administrative aspects of the contract, and reporting on seismic observations relevant to the site characterization.

2005-present: I am faculty emeritus at UNR.

Organizational Activity:

Member: American Geophysical Union

Member: Seismological Society of America

Treasurer (1998-2006) of the Seismological Society of America, a 2000-member group representing the professional interests of U. S. (and other) seismologists.

Co-chair (with J. G. Anderson) of the 2005 annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America

Authorship:

BOOKS

CRC Handbook of Curves and Surfaces, 1990.

CRC Standard Curves and Surfaces, CRC Press, 1993.

Practical Handbook of Curve Design and Generation, CRC Press, 1994.

CRC Standard Curves and Surfaces with Mathematica, 2nd Edition, CRC Press, 2008.

CRC Standard Curves and Surfaces with Mathematica, 3rd Edition, CRC Press, 2015.

Peer-Reviewed PAPERS

Electromagnetic mapping of Hawaiian lava tubes (with W. M. Adams), Bull. Assoc.

Engineer. Geol., v. 6, pp. 95-104, 1969.

The effects of radiation patterns on magnitude estimates, Bull. Seism. Soc.

Am., v. 60, pp. 503-516, 1970.

Theoretical and observed Rayleigh-wave spectra for explosions and earthquakes

(with D. G. Lambert), J. Geophys. Res., v. 75, pp. 7382-7402, 1970.

Relative location of seismic events using surface waves, Geophys. J., v. 26,

pp. 499-513, 1972.

Source time functions and spectra for underground nuclear explosions (with

R. Blandford), Geophys. J., v. 31, pp. 83-97, 1972.

Seismic surface waves from Amchitka Island Test Site events and their relation

to source mechanism, J. Geophys. Res., v. 78, pp. 2467-2474, 1973.

Joint magnitude determination and analysis of variance for explosion magnitude

estimates, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 63, pp. 827-845, 1973.

Seismic threshold determination (with R. Blandford), Bull. Seism. Soc. Am.,

v. 66, pp. 753-788, 1976.

Amplitude-distance relation for 20-second Rayleigh waves, Bull. Seism. Soc.

Am., v. 67, pp. 405-411, 1977.

Applications of surface-wave ray tracing (with P. A. Sobel), Bull. Seism. Soc.

Am., v. 68, pp. 1359-1380, 1978.

A study of amplitude anomaly and mb bias as LASA subarrays (with A. C. Chang),

J. Geophys. Res., v. 85, pp. 4811-4828, 1980.

A random stress model for seismicity statistics and earthquake prediction,

Geophys. Res. Letters, v. 7, pp. 637-640, 1980.

Seismicity parameters preceding moderate to major earthquakes (with S. S.

Alexander and C.-E. Baag), J. Geophys. Res., v. 86, pp. 9325-9351, 1981.

A study of variations in the horizontal to vertical Lg amplitude ratio in the

eastern United States (with I. N. Gupta and R. A. Wagner), Bull. Seism. Soc.

Am., v. 72, pp. 2081-2088, 1982.

Spatial resolution of acoustic imaging with the Born approximation, Geophysics,

v. 56, pp. 1185-1202, 1991.

Depth imaging resolution of 3-D seismic recording patterns, Geophysics, v. 59,

pp. 564-576, 1994.

Distribution of precarious rocks at the Nevada Test Site: Comparison with ground

motion predictions from nuclear tests (with J. N. Brune and A. Anooshehpoor),

J. Geophys. Res., v. 108, doi:10.1029/2002JB002000, 2003.

Linearity of the earthquake recurrence curve to M < -1 from Little Skull

Mountain Aftershocks in Southern Nevada, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 93, pp.

2493-2501, 2003.

Evidence for 30 km deep magma injection (with K. D. Smith, G. Blewitt, L.

Preston, J. G. Anderson, B. P. Wernicke, and J. L. Davis), Science, v. 305, pp.

1277-1280, 2004.

Seismic background noise and detection threshold in the Southern Great Basin

Digital Seismic Network, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 94, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 94, pp. 2280-2298, 2004.

P-wave velocity structure in the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, region (with L. Preston and K. Smith), J. Geophys. Res., v. 112, B11305, 2007.

Location and magnitude estimation of the 9 October 2006 Korean nuclear explosion using the Southern Great Basin Digital Seismic Network as a large-aperture array (with I. M. Tibuleac, J. G. Anderson, K. W. Smith, A. Aburto, and T. Rennie), Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 98, pp. 756-767, 2008.

Demographics of the 2007 SSA membership (with J. G. Anderson and Y. Miyata), Seism. Res. Letts., v. 79, pp. 25-32, 2008.

Seismic spatial-temporal character and effects of a deep (25-30 km) magma intrusion below north Lake Tahoe, California-Nevada (with K. D. Smith and L. A. Preston), Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 98, pp. 1508-1526, 2008.

Exceptional ground motions recorded during the 26 April 2008 Mw 5.0 earthquake in Mogul, Nevada (with J. G. Anderson, I. Tibuleac, A. Anooshehpoor, G. Biasi, and K. Smith), Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 99, pp. 3475-3486, 2009.

Direct empirical estimation of arrival-time picking error from waveform cross-correlation, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am., v. 99 pp. 2749-2758, 2009.

Computing Green’s Functions from ambient noise recorded by accelerometers and analog, broadband, and narrow-band seismometers (with I. M. Tibuleac, J. G. Anderson, and J. N. Louie), Seism. Res. Letts., v. 82, pp. 661-675, 2011.

Exploring reflection and transmission coefficients in elastic media, The Mathematica Journal, v. 14, 2012.

Crust-mantle boundary reflectors in Nevada from ambient seismic noise autocorrelations (with I. M. Tibuleac), Geophys. J. Internat., doi: 10.1111/j.1365-246X.2011.05336.x, 2012.

Double-difference location and ground-truth classification of the 2008 Mogul, Nevada, very shallow earthquake sequence (with J. G. Anderson, I. M. Tibuleac, and G. P. Biasi), Seism. Res. Lets., v. 86, pp. 146-157, 2015.

Evidence for Moho-lower crustal transition depth diking and rifting of the Sierra Nevada microplane (with K. D. Smith, G. M Kent, N.W. Driscoll, and A. Eisses), Geophys. Res. Lett., v. 43, doi: 10.1002/2016GL070283.

Velocity change in the zone of a moderate Mw 5.0 earthquake revealed by autocorrelation of ambient noise and by event spectra (with J. G. Anderson), Pure Appl. Geophys., v. 174, pp. 1923-1935, doi: 10.1007/s00024-017-1521-2.

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