[time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Fri Apr 27 07:55:40 UTC 2012


Fun talk at the USGS last (Thur) night:
  ShakeAlert!
  --building an earthquake early warning system for California
  by Doug Given

He's a good speaker.  If you get a chance to hear him, go for it.
  http://online.wr.usgs.gov/calendar/
The video should be up in their archives in a few days.
  http://online.wr.usgs.gov/calendar/2012.html
(scroll down to April)

The basic idea is to detect an earthquake at location X, and then spread the 
word using telecommunications.  Earthquakes propagate at 2 miles/sec so 
phone/internet is much faster.  Ballpark is 30-60 seconds of warning.

The reason this might be interesting for time-nuts is that he mentioned using 
GPS to supplement seismometers.  The context is that they need the answer in 
a few seconds.  I didn't catch any details.

It's unlikely that they are doing any fancy post-processing.  I suppose it's 
possible that they have streamlined the traditional post-processing setup so 
that they can do it in a few seconds.  Maybe that is mostly getting an early 
look at the data the traditional post-processing processing uses.


-- 
These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's.  I hate spam.







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