Issue 2 — DFOS datasets · The Backscatter

Happy November DFOS practitioners,

For many people, this month provides an opportunity to practice gratitude and reflection. For those of us working in DFOS, we truly have a lot to be grateful for! For example, we are experiencing an explosion of open-source DFOS software and publicly available datasets.

This past month, we tracked down nearly 100 such datasets in widely varying settings from Antarctic ice sheets to city streets. We have highlighted some of them below, but you can find the whole list in the datasets section of the newly created Backscatter directory. See any missing? Send them our way.

Featured Signal

This month’s featured signal is from J. Govoorts et al. (2025) , who built a double cantilever beam Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) accelerometer to monitor the seismic activity of the Reykjanes Peninsula (Iceland), showcasing the reliability of their sensors in the harsh Icelandic weather.

3 MLw earthquake recorded by an FBG-based accelerometer at the Gunnuhver power plant (Iceland) — A. Waveform of a 3 MLw earthquake that occurred on the Reykjanes Peninsula at 21:11 on 30 July 2024. It was recorded by an FBG-based accelerometer equipped with cantilever beams and a conventional seismometer, with the instrument response removed for both instruments. The FBG data has been resampled to 100 Hz and the instrument response of the Güralp CMG-3ESPCD has been removed prior to data processing. A bandpass filter has been applied between 1 Hz and 45 Hz for both instruments. B. Fourier transforms after the instrument response for both sensors and before correction for FBG accelerometer. CC BY 4.0. View full size.

Collaborator Corner

DCLDE 2027 DAS fin-whale localization challenge — locate fin-whale calls on two OOI cables; training data are available. The tentative workshop/abstract deadline is 1 March 2027; a challenge-entry deadline is not confirmed.
EarthScope DAS Community list — where DAS calls and collaborators are posted now the RCN has ended.
Nordic DAS — a new hub turning Nordic telecom fiber into seismic sensors.

Datasets

All datasets

These publicly available datasets have varied access requirements and reuse terms; the directory records formats, access requirements, and available license information.

Global DAS Month 2023 — coordinated 60-minute earthquake windows from 32 DAS systems worldwide.
Stanford campus telecom-conduit DAS — about two and a half years of continuous 50 Hz DAS for long-term monitoring studies.
Rutford icequake DAS — selected Antarctic icequake windows, cable geometry, and detection catalogs in a roughly 253 MB download.
Greenland calving-front fiber data — measured DAS and DTS with figure-reproduction code; the archive also includes tsunami model output.
Labeled fin-whale DAS examples — annotated calls from three seafloor cables for comparing signal levels across instrument settings.
CFOS traffic-monitoring dataset — more than nine hours of labeled traffic DAS, plus a short sample with the source video.
Galileo 2026 mine fiber measurements — mine measurements spanning DAS, DSS, and OTDR, with tutorials for loading and processing the data.
Bridge prestressing-wire breaks — measured strain during deliberate bridge-girder wire cuts, with Python evaluation scripts.
Wind-tunnel heated-fiber DTS — heated-fiber DTS measurements and analysis notebooks for distributed wind sensing, in a roughly 307 MB download.

Software

All software

fosanalysis — crack-width analysis for distributed strain data.
dtscalibration — calibrate raw DTS measurements in Python.
DASPack — fast DAS compression, lossless or to a set error.
das-anomaly — unsupervised anomaly detection for DAS.
DASstore — object storage for DAS archives on Zarr.

Events

Upcoming events and deadlines

OFS-30 — Optical Fiber Sensors in Raleigh, 30 November–4 December.
AGU26 — San Francisco, 7–11 December, with fiber sessions S001 and S016.
EGU27 — the Fibre-optic sensing in the Geosciences session; abstracts due 12 January.
OFC 2027 — a DAS short course in Los Angeles on 7 March.
Call for papers: BSSA special issue on optical seismology and a companion SRL focus section, due February 2027.

Jobs

Open positions

Postdoc: DAS seismology in Antarctic ice — DAS on an EPICA borehole and surface array at Dome C.
Postdoc: fiber-optic seismology — DAS for earthquake dynamics; open until filled.
Project Engineer UK — Commission DAS/DTS on pipelines, power cables and railways.
Project Engineer: fiber optics and system integration — Commission DFOS monitoring systems worldwide; ~25% travel.
Junior Geophysicist: fiber-optic sensing and AI — Entry-level DAS/DTS fieldwork, Python and ML event detection.
Seismologist — Geothermal seismic monitoring with borehole DAS; PhD required.
Graduate research assistantship: DTS and urban water systems — Funded PhD/MS using DTS and ML on urban water systems.

Until next month,

The Backscatter team.

This issue's contributors: Derrick Chambers and Olivier Fontaine.