Daniel R.H. O’Connell, Ph.D. 

Dan’s professional geophysical career spans 47 years (1977-present).  With extensive experience and expertise in active and passive seismology. This includes extensive experience planning and executing complex active source seismic surveys and passive instrument deployments. He has spent ~20 years designing, implementing, operating, and processing data from passive seismic instrument deployments that he has used to investigate earthquake properties and Earth structure. These included 11 passive seismic studies to determine focal mechanisms and moment tensors of microseismicity. He designed and executed active-source vibroseis seismology projects with seismic node sensors for intensive investigations of Earth structure for 13 years and processing and interpretation of seismic reflection data over 32 years. Dan was the technical project lead for active seismology projects while working for WLA-Fugro, Tetra Tech, and the USGS over the period of 2011-2023 designing, acquiring, and post-processing seismic data from 35 projects that acquired 3D seismic data using seismic node sensors and one or more vibroseis active sources. Of these 35 projects nine of these projects employed more than 1000 seismic nodes and vibroseis sources. 

Daniel obtained a B.S. in Geophysics from Purdue University in May 1980. In 1977, while studying at Purdue, he spent a summer on a dynamite-helicopter seismic crew acquiring seismic reflection data in the eastern Utah overthrust belt working as a driller and juggy. In 1978 he started working in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake program helping deploy temporary seismic networks and processing earthquake data to determine earthquake locations, focal mechanisms, and seismotectonic structure.  During his geophysics graduate studies at the University of California Berkeley Daniel obtained an M.A. in geophysics (1982) and a Ph.D. in geophysics in 1986. In 1982 he produced a U.S. professional paper on the seismic tectonics of the New Madrid seismic zone from my analyses of data for a temporary seismic network. Daniel deployed a temporary seismic network in The Geysers geothermal field in California and used the data to do a joint P- and S-wave progressive velocity-hypocenter inversion and estimate moment tensors of microearthquakes. 

As a research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University from 1986-1991 Daniel designed, deployed, and processed active and passive source seismic data from temporary seismic arrays deployed in the Transantarctic Mountains to derive the first published two dimensional images of crustal and Moho structure beneath the Transantarctic Mountains.