GEOFON seeks to facilitate cooperation in seismological research and earthquake and tsunami hazard mitigation by providing rapid transnational access to seismological data and source parameters of large earthquakes, and keeping these data accessible in the long term.
It pursues these aims by operating and maintaining a global network of permanent broadband stations in cooperation with local partners, facilitating real time access to data from this network and those of many partner networks and plate boundary observatories, providing a permanent and secure archive for seismological data. It also archives and makes accessible data from temporary experiments carried out by scientists at German universities and institutions, thereby fostering cooperation and encouraging the full exploitation of all acquired data and serving as the permanent archive for the Geophysical Instrument Pool at Potsdam (GIPP). It also organises the data exchange of real-time and archived data with partner institutions and international centres.