Is Crowdsourced Earthquake Early Warning Already a Reality?

Session: Earthquake Early Warning: Current Status and Latest Innovations
Type: Oral
Date: 4/29/2020
Time: 08:45 AM
Room: 115
Description: 

Any smartphone can be transformed into a seismic station by accessing the data in real time from its internal motion sensor and with smartphone ubiquity, there is the potential to create the densest global seismic network ever created at basically no cost. One of the key challenges is to ensure that an app aiming to exploit this potential is widely adopted.

The EarthQuake Network (EQN) App is the most downloaded earthquake themed app (5M on Android) and LastQuake is also a highly ranked earthquake app that has currently 900 000 active users. We examine what these apps can offer in terms of earthquake early warning (EEW), rapid information and rapid situational awareness.

EQN directly accesses motion sensor data when smartphones are being charged. Earthquake detection is produced through coincident triggers on several neighboring smartphones and EQN immediately notifies others users within a default distance of 300 km without attempting to predict shaking level.

LastQuake detects the online reaction of eyewitnesses by monitoring Twitter publications, rapid variations of traffic on the Euro-Mediterranean Seismic Centre’s (EMSC) websites or in the number of LastQuake app launches, an approach called “crowdsourced detections” to automatically identify widely felt earthquakes regardless their magnitude. It then invites eyewitnesses to share their observations on earthquake effects (felt reports, open comments, geo-located pictures).

We will present EQN EEW performance and how this simplified EEW service is perceived and appreciated, based on a questionnaire sent to its users. For LastQuake we will focus on how rapidly damage can be detected from crowdsourced data and illustrate this using the M 6.4 Albania earthquake of Nov. 26.

Presenting Author: Remy Bossu

Authors