Precariously balanced rock data from northern New York and Vermont, USA

This work describes observations of boulders and their pedestals at five sites in New York and Vermont, which are used to calculate scaling factors for the 2023 time-independent National Seismic Hazard Model site-specific hazard curves (Petersen, M.D., Shumway, A.M., Powers, P.M., Field, E.H., Moschetti, M.P., Jaiswal, K.S., Milner, K.R., Rezaeian, S., Frankel, A.D., Llenos, A.L. and Michael, A.J., 2024. The 2023 US 50-State National Seismic Hazard Model: Overview and implications. Earthquake Spectra, 40(1), pp.5-88). This approach represents the current best-practice for validating hazard curves using precariously balanced rocks (e.g., Rood, A.H., Rood, D.H., Stirling, M.W., Madugo, C.M., Abrahamson, N.A., Wilcken, K.M., Gonzalez, T., Kottke, A., Whittaker, A.C., Page, W.D. and Stafford, P.J., 2020. Earthquake hazard uncertainties improved using precariously balanced rocks. AGU Advances, 1(4), p.e2020AV000182).

The files are organized into categories of data and results. The results consist of three tabular CSV files with filenames beginning with the prefix "results_". These files contain the geometric parameters necessary to calculate precariously balanced rock fragilities as well as the scaling factors calculated during validation of the site-specific hazard curves. The data files are in three subcategories: (1) lidar-derived point clouds as CSV data beginning with the prefix 'adkpbr_', which can be opened with standard open-source software such as CloudCompare (https://github.com/cloudcompare/cloudcompare); (2) seismometer recordings stored as miniseed binaries (https://ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc/data/formats/miniseed/), with recordings for each site in a compressed folder beginning with the prefix 'miniseed_'; and (3) summary figures as PDF files with a TXT file for the captions, beginning with the prefix 'figures_', which include pictures of all boulders. The file names specify the sites.