California Launches First Statewide Earthquake Early Warning System (buzzfeednews.com) 17
hcs_$reboot writes: Everyone in California will now receive earthquake alerts on their phones seconds before the ground begins to shake, giving residents up to 20 seconds of warning before shaking begins. Developed by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley, the MyShake application (residents will need to download the app to receive the alerts in areas without cell phone coverage) is designed to alert the public when a magnitude 4.5 earthquake or greater has been detected and has been shown to be faster than other alert delivery methods. The wireless emergency alerts will be sent in the event of a more significant quake, magnitude 5.0 or greater. The system does not predict earthquakes. Rather, it uses numerous seismic stations to detect the start of an earthquake and light-speed communications to send the data to computers that instantly calculate location, magnitude, intensity of shaking and create alerts to be distributed to areas that will be affected. When the MyShake app was released back in 2016 it already detected over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries.
A paper describing the early results gives a general idea of the app's success: "On a typical day about 8,000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence."
A paper describing the early results gives a general idea of the app's success: "On a typical day about 8,000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence."
Open Source (Score:2)
It isn't open source, so who knows what it does.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't open source, so who knows what it does.
The team at Berkley who designed and wrote it. [berkeley.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
"It isn't open source, so who knows what it does."
Are you afraid it would report an earthquake when you rub one off?
Possible problems with simultinaiety (Score:1)
I support the warning system as such, but I wonder phones with their varying latencies and alert noises might be the worst way to do it. Might be wrong, but I think in Japan they use sirens, so everyone gets the warning at the same time. It may cause some to pull their car to the side of the road before others have even gotten the warning. Also, the alert noises tend to be very startling. Calling someone to immediate action after startling them might be dangerous.
Re: (Score:2)
Japan doesn't use sirens (except for evacuation orders I think), they use a feature of the cellphone network to provide warnings (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and the Japanese edition of that page)
I believe (but am not 100% sure) that the cheap network or phone that I'm using doesn't support this, and just uses standard Google/Apple push notifications.
The Japanese wikipedia page says that the current system in use (ETWS) takes about 4 seconds to transmit these notifications.
Also, though I haven't l
Re: (Score:1)
I must have misremembered a video I saw about their system.
Earthquake magnitude (Score:2)
Please use the Rictus Scale [wikipedia.org]
Obligatory xkcd (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: repeat of Hawaii - please don't do (Score:1)
California Launches First Statewide Earthquake Ear (Score:2)
About time?
Oh Boy I can't wait for someone to go to jail! (Score:2)
https://www.theverge.com/2014/... [theverge.com]
Just wait until someone in a position of power gets pissed off at a missed or bad prediction. It not like people don't already consider scientists infallible once they get a consensus, despite not having had a single prediction come true.
Any person asked to serve on this warning system should demand legal protection from not being perfect. It needs to be clear that they are only doing the best they can with the information they have at the time!
Re: (Score:2)
It seems your climate change denialism efforts have made you so immune to facts and evidence that you can't even allow yourself to read summaries for fear of your opinion being invalidated before you can post. As the summary states, this app makes no predictions. It reports events after they happen.
Still a test! (Score:2)
"... California officials cautioned that the new public system unveiled this week is still a work in progress and that they would continue to improve the speed and reliability of the alerts.
'The keyword is that this is a test,' DeGroot said. 'We want to learn about ways to improve the speed of the delivery, getting messages to their destination, and also testing the scalability going from thousands of people to millions of people.'..."
Crying wolf (Score:2)
Anybody Remember W6FXN? (Score:2)
We had this in Southern California 30 years ago on the W6FXN 2 meter repeater which monitored the Running Springs seismometer and rebroadcast it in real time if it deviated. The warning time was often 5 to 10 seconds.