There should be a kaggle challenge for this, I would love to give that data a shot.
Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I attended a talk by one of the developers of this system, and since earthquake warnings are so short (tens of seconds), it's unlikely that traditional alert mechanisms can be delivered to the general public. As such, the primary consumers of the device will be places like nuclear power plants and major industrial operators who are willing to install special alarms. The other example he gave was giving doctors perfor…
Cell phone app. Setup something like the reverse-911 system, or even just a downloadable app that can wake your phone from sleep and use the speakers to alert its carrier that an earthquake is on the way. Hell, maybe this is even a use for "Yo".
There is tool like that: "Red Alert : Israel". It's available in the App Store, and currently being used for missile launch alerts in Israel.
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the system were relatively reliable, 10 seconds is actually a lot of time. During the day, it's enough time for many people to take cover. During the night, it's enough time to at least get people up and semi-oriented. The other thing to note is that earthquakes are much shorter than most people think, usually about a minute long. 10 seconds is quite a bit of time compared to that.
But there's no way to reliably get information to all people within ten seconds. Even if a text message alert was sent out as soon as the system was triggered, that time, plus the time for even the most phone-ready people to pull out their phone and do the necessary steps to read a message leads to basically no warning at all.
Amber Alerts are pushed to my phone and I do not have to do anything to see them or know they are there. They sound an alarm tone and change the display. I also receive tornado warnings this way.
Verizon, Atlanta
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#64Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.
As someone who used to work for a university's geosciences department as a Unix sysadmin/programmer and who worked on two different seismic monitoring networks (one spread across the state for earthquake monitoring and one parked on top of a coal mine), allow me to explain why earthquake monitoring in the United States is largely stuck in the stone age: There's no f---ing money. Back in the '80s, there were a lot of…
How cheap is dirt cheap? $1000? $100? $10? $1? $0.1?
Are there established algorithms to determine what seismic data is 'interesting' as opposed to streaming it all in real time (and keeping the radio on) constantly?
Why 802.11n instead of cell phone networks - don't you need to be away from traffic vibrations, and hence roads and homes?
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Japan, all phones (even the iPhone) are setup to emit a loud alarm sound when an earthquake warning is sent, whether your phone is on manner mode or not. The alarm sound is very distinctive and the same for all phones as well as all TV channels.
People in Tokyo had a 60 second warning for the 2011 quake. Here's a good translation of the TV alerts from that day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KfBwkMw_M Phone alert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAAIcqI_0Jk Warning countdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-FMpNBfna8
Here's a matrix of the 6 big TV channels. Top left is the national broadcast (of the public broadcaster, NHK), the others are local commercial Tokyo broadcasts. The earthquake was initially not estimated to be big enough to affect Tokyo so Tokyo stations didn't automatically broadcast the initial alert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOrAwvJLKxo
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cell phone app. Setup something like the reverse-911 system, or even just a downloadable app that can wake your phone from sleep and use the speakers to alert its carrier that an earthquake is on the way. Hell, maybe this is even a use for "Yo".
How about the delay? The message is not delivered instantly. Plus, such a system would be required to be already scaled up, and stay in that state always, to support sending messages to millions of "subscribers", which would only add additional delay.
Wouldn't it be possible to use an IPv6 broadcast, thus making messaging of "everybody" trivial?
All that would then be required is that cell phones, pads and computers give some sort of non-mistakeable warning sound upon receiving these packets.
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#67Yo. From EARTHQUAKE. [edit] tough crowd...
Jokes are frowned upon on HN. Everyone is bent on avoiding the slashdot slippery slope. Communities do learn with History...
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#68So... why is it (geologically) not possible to predict an earthquake earlier than 10 seconds? Anyone know of research trying to beat that?
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#69So... why is it (geologically) not possible to predict an earthquake earlier than 10 seconds? Anyone know of research trying to beat that?
They're not actually predicting the earthquake - just detecting it as soon as it happens, and transmitting a signal out faster than the earthquake waves travel. So to beat that requires actually predicting when it will happen beforehand, which nobody has made any real headway on in a long time.
Re: Earthquake early-warning system gave 10-second alert before Napa quake felt
#70So... why is it (geologically) not possible to predict an earthquake earlier than 10 seconds? Anyone know of research trying to beat that?
It's not a prediction if the earthquake has already begun. The linked article explains that they were able to give ten seconds' warning only because a sensor near the epicenter was able to send an alert at the speed of light, thus beating the seismic waves, which travel at a much slower speed.
About prediction research, so far there are too few ways to gather relevant data for processes deep within the earth, and too little theoretical knowledge. This should be an attractive field for someone with enough physical and scientific training and a willingness to do difficult research.