We developed a code MouseTrap for automated detection of fling step disturbances in seismic records. The program is available under free license at website http://geo.mff.cuni.cz/ ~vackar/mouse (last accessed January 2015).
The spurious input acceleration step and the instrument response explain many of the observed disturbances very well. Fitting the synthetic disturbance into real records provides four parameters of the input acceleration step, namely its onset time t0, amplitude A, azimuth , and inclination.
The code can be applied either to an individual record or to a set of records with metadata in a database. We expect the code to be useful in many applications for automatic data processing (e.g., waveform inversion and SNR evaluation) in which detection and removal of contaminated records is a must.