Live data from Hacker News

Tsunami Warning for Northern California

tsunami.gov

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#111

Based on the location and focal mechanism of the earthquake ( https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc75095651... ), this is a strike-slip earthquake on the plate boundary between the Pacific and Gorda/Juan de Fuca plates. Strike-slip earthquakes occur when two plates slide beside each other during an earthquake, usually along a steeply-dipping if not vertical fault. These kinds of earthquakes almost neve…

The system is training me to ignore it already. I’m in SF and we had a flash flood emergency alert. I never heard of or saw any floods. I could believe a street or two might have had a few inches of water at most. But honestly I’d bet against even that. And then there’s this tsunami alert today.

> I never heard of or saw any floods.

There was a ton of flooding on flat roads and highways during the last week+ long storm session. I saw several lanes impassable on 101, and several spots in SF where a car could easily have gotten flooded.

All the alerts I got were basically "please don't drive" and not "you're gonna die!", which I think is totally reasonable.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#112
post #98

Interesting observation: I am in a circumstance where I am transitioning from an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy) to a iPhone. I observed that android phone alerted me about an earthquake and that I should be ready to feel tremors. To my surprise as I was pondering how this system works - especially wrt to latency - where it alerts me head of time, I then fell small tremors in 2 or 3 seconds after the alert. The tremor…

It varies, a lot, and depends upon a lot of things. I'm not current on all the current details, but many moons ago was involved in push notification development. * Notification path. IoS at the time was pretty protective of the user's battery, and had specific services you had to use. I imagine there's special treatment now for emergency communications. * Phone state. How deeply asleep is it? Are there other backgrou…

> a three-letter acronym with an ampersand in the middle

wasn't the official name switched to no longer use that ampersand so it is just the three letters now (and for some time)?

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#114
Two observations:

1) The blanket warning for areas that are clearly outside inundation zones drives a lot of confusion/fear. We can vastly improve our warning infra by utilizing better geo data to drive more effective alerts. For example, Tsunami inundation zone data is well known. Why not send only to phones currently in and maybe within 250m of those zones?

2) A lot of 'am I in a tsunami inundation zone?' sites were broken when I checked. them. Official government sites too. Of course that could be a function of traffic, but if so, it demonstrates a lack of resilience in their systems. We need better.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#117
post #87

Based on the location and focal mechanism of the earthquake ( https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc75095651... ), this is a strike-slip earthquake on the plate boundary between the Pacific and Gorda/Juan de Fuca plates. Strike-slip earthquakes occur when two plates slide beside each other during an earthquake, usually along a steeply-dipping if not vertical fault. These kinds of earthquakes almost neve…

Looking at https://tsunami.gov/ , it seems like they do have a 4 tier system, but they jumped straight to the highest tier in this case?

HN has good SnR generally, but I would default to trusting their automated system more than Random Internet Guy. Even if the warning gets canceled after measurements become available.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#118
post #72

This webcam should let us know in a few minutes if this is real: https://www.pacificblue.biz/noyo-harbor-webcam/ Edit: arrival time has come and gone. No indication of movement in water level.

Well I didn't see a Tsunami but thanks to this thread I do have a few nice live streams of pleasant water views going. Kind of relaxing tbh.

I loved the days when people could/would set up webcams like this. Just to see outside and share it with others. They're getting so much harder to find.

This is quite relaxing, I agree. Here's a couple from Pacifica, CA for you.

https://www.pacificaview.net/livecam/

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#119

Interesting observation: I am in a circumstance where I am transitioning from an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy) to a iPhone. I observed that android phone alerted me about an earthquake and that I should be ready to feel tremors. To my surprise as I was pondering how this system works - especially wrt to latency - where it alerts me head of time, I then fell small tremors in 2 or 3 seconds after the alert. The tremor…

i've also observed android to be consistently faster on these alerts

google maintains an open TCP connection on every android device (IIRC it's part of GMSCore) which allows them to push to phones with extremely low latency.
Post reply on HN