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Smartphones
Used As Sensors For Earthquake Early Warning Alert |
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Your
smartphone can do just about anything.
Broadcast live video, track a flight, play
the piano, and more. The possibilities might
be endless. Researchers at Caltech and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) are working on an earthquake early warning system based on the collective data fed in by thousands of
smartphones.
Millions upon millions of people live in
earthquake prone areas, but only a handful
of countries and states have early warning
detection /alert system.
A network of smartphones can be used to provide a cheap, but reliable early warning system for earthquakes.
Sarah Minson, a USGS geophysicist realized that smartphones could very well be used as seismic sensors, albeit not as sensitive. Harnessing the collective power of many smartphones can thus help build a crowd-sourced alert network.
The GPS receivers build inside smartphones are sufficient
enough to detect the permanent ground movement, or displacement, caused by fault motion in earthquakes that are approximately magnitude 7 and
larger, Their findings suggest. The signal is passed through the network and an algorithm analyzes it to determine where the earthquake took place and how long it will take until reaches an individual user, which becomes alerted.
“Thirty years ago it took months to assemble a crude picture of the deformations from an earthquake. This new technology promises to provide a near-instantaneous picture with much greater resolution,” says Thomas Heaton, professor of engineering seismology and a coauthor of the new study.
A test was conducted on the crowd-sourced earthquake early warning (EEW) system on data that simulated a magnitude 7 earthquake, and with real data from the 2011 magnitude 9 Tohoku-oki which devastated Japan. The results show that with as little as 5,000 smartphones, EEW works fairly good
connected in a large metropolitan area.
“The U.S. earthquake early warning system is being built on our high-quality scientific earthquake networks, but crowd-sourced approaches can augment our system and have real potential to make warnings possible in places that don’t have high-quality networks,” says Douglas Given, USGS coordinator of the ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System.
“Crowd-sourced data are less precise, but for larger earthquakes that cause large shifts in the ground surface, they contain enough information to detect that an earthquake has occurred, information necessary for early warning,” says study coauthor Susan Owen of
JPL.
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