Analyzing Data From MyShake Smartphone Seismic Network

Date: 4/26/2019

Time: 09:00 AM

Room: Elliott Bay

MyShake is a global smartphone seismic network that harnesses the power of crowdsourcing. The deployment of a seismometer becomes a simple download of MyShake application in the app store that turns the smartphone into a portable seismometer. The accelerometers inside the phones can be used to monitor the ground motions during the earthquakes and using the onboard communication unit to send the data to the central data center. After the release of MyShake in Feb 2016, more than 900 earthquakes were recorded by the citizen scientists globally, with some of the earthquakes recorded by many users nearby. Even though the quality of the sensors inside a smartphone is low compared with the traditional sensors, the large number of users will compensate on the quality. In this presentation, I will report the recent analysis on the data we collected globally from the consumer devices and show that the MyShake global smartphone seismic network can do many useful applications in seismology and engineering, such as detect the earthquakes, and estimate the earthquake parameters, such as magnitude, location, and origin time, and potential structural health monitoring. This will be really useful for places where they can not afford traditional seismometers and used as a stand-alone seismic network to monitor earthquakes in the region.

Presenting Author: Qingkai Kong

Authors