Effective geophysical monitoring relies on high-quality, purpose-built instrumentation and infrastructure. Until recently, independent monitoring efforts across earth science disciplines have resulted in redundant station infrastructure, where telemetry, power subsystems and digital recorder instruments are often deployed in parallel. This increases project costs, limits station numbers and decreases a network’s monitoring extent, particularly in institutions with limited funding.

Low power consumption, precise timing and reliable data flow are important qualities to consider when deploying a geophysical monitoring station and support overall mission success and network performance. The Centaur, originally designed as a networked seismic datalogger, embodies these core qualities while supporting various seismic, acoustic, geodetic, magnetic and environmental sensor types. Support for automatic back-fill features using flexible telemetry methods helps maintain data fidelity and completeness. Together, these capabilities support multi-disciplinary geophysical station applications such as volcano monitoring, where seismic, infrasound, and environmental monitoring are desired. This, thereby, helps to lower the infrastructural costs of station deployments.

Current and planned capabilities promoting the integration of multi-disciplinary approaches in geophysical monitoring are discussed.