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General Issues > Sensor

The Issue of Man-made Noise

Now what about cultural noise in the SFBA: car traffic on highways, trucks and busses, the BART, Union Pacific trains, roadwork and excavations, large cranes and elevators, and heavy machinery? These man-made sources of (weak) ground motion will certainly be found in the area to be covered.

Typically, field seismologists invest a lot of effort in the search for quiet sites—locations exhibiting the lowest possible level of ground motion. Logically, they prefer to install their sensors far away from human activity. Only on a high-quality site does the investment in a state-of-the-art force-balanced accelerometer really pay off.