Stability and Power Consumption Tests for Time Base Selection of an Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS)

During the past few decades, ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) have become a key equipment in order to study the ocean sub-bottom material as well as natural seismic activity monitoring. The stability of the time base element constitutes a highly important parameter in marine geophysical applications, as the equipment has no access to a synchronization signal (GPS) during the experiment. On the other hand, as every autonomous instrument, the OBS´s autonomy is inversely proportional to its electrical power consumption. This paper presents stability and power consumption tests of different time base generator technologies in order to be included in our ocean bottom seismometer, now under construction.