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Tsunami Warning for Northern California

tsunami.gov

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Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#161

Post by dekhn »

colesantiago wrote: post #153
dekhn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's unpack what you're saying. You seem to believe that AGI would be able to predict something that we have been actively researching for decades. I do not see how AGI would suddenly be able to solve a problem that smart people have already been working on, unless the AGI was also "superintelligent" in ways that contributed. AGI proper is merely artificial intelligence, not necessarily superintelligence. Second, I…

lets pack this altogether. so you don't believe it would save lives? prevention is better than a cure and with AGI this would significantly a lot of people, not just SF. > smart people have already been working on, If they were so smart why haven't they found it yet? We now have weather prediction and protein folding now solved problems which were extremely difficult problems. I don't see how this doesn't apply to ea…

I think it's unlikely having better earthquake prediction would save lives in an economically justifiable way.

Neither weather prediction or protein folding are solved problems; that's the press misrepresenting the advances here.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#162

Post by caseyf7 »

cossatot wrote: post #68

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…

Also confusing when the SF Fire captain is on the radio telling people to evacuate to 100 ft above sea level right after a CalTech seismologist says it is unlikely to cause much of a tsunami due to being a strike-slip earthquake.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#163

Post by wooten »

sparky_z wrote: post #129
wooten wrote: post #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 wer…

>Why not send only to phones currently in and maybe within 250m of those zones? There's often significant lag between the earthquake and the arrival time. You don't just want the people in the inundation zone to know, you also want everyone else to know to stay away. That's not just a theoretical edge case. If this had been a major tsunami your system would have killed me just now. I would have been outside of your s…

ah yes excellent point.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#164

Post by Melatonic »

numpad0 wrote: post #124
Rebelgecko wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wireless emergency alerts (like what you see for amber alerts) that go over cell towers have pretty high latency (IIRC on the order of a minute or two for the alert to disseminate). The native Android earthquake alerts are much faster

Carrier alerts is the fastest. Not only the whole process from detecting tremors to alerts take 30 seconds or so, there aren't other data sources than what those carriers use anyway, so there's just no way Google can be faster than carriers. PWS is also a broadcast, meaning the phones don't have to wait for cellular timeslots, so it's faster and bandwidth efficient in that regard too.

When I was on Android the integrated Google system was always much faster than anything else

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#165

Post by jcrawfordor »

numpad0 wrote: post #124
Rebelgecko wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wireless emergency alerts (like what you see for amber alerts) that go over cell towers have pretty high latency (IIRC on the order of a minute or two for the alert to disseminate). The native Android earthquake alerts are much faster

Carrier alerts is the fastest. Not only the whole process from detecting tremors to alerts take 30 seconds or so, there aren't other data sources than what those carriers use anyway, so there's just no way Google can be faster than carriers. PWS is also a broadcast, meaning the phones don't have to wait for cellular timeslots, so it's faster and bandwidth efficient in that regard too.

Unfortunately the architecture of IPAWS can introduce fairly long delays. The EEWS system uses a dedicated channel to deliver alerts to WEA more quickly, since a study by USGS/NIST had determined that IPAWS could not meet time objectives (typically ~5 minutes end to end). The tsunami warning center, like basically everyone except for USGS, has to originate alerts through IPAWS. The performance and latency problems with IPAWS have been flagged by GAO a couple of times now but it's not something that receives much investment. All-Hazards Radio (weather radio) should actually be a faster alerting mechanism for tsunamis, in practice, since NOAA operates that system themselves.

The Android Alerts are actually coming off of IPAWS as well, but I believe they take a feed directly from the publishing system and do all of the routing themselves. Their implementation is of course quite a bit faster than IPAWS rather creaky and sort of batch-centric architecture.

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#166

Post by [deleted] »

numpad0 wrote: post #74
quietthrow wrote: post #33

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…

LTE ETWS/PWS is mandatory feature, iPhones has the same thing. Maybe you've explicitly disabled it, considering (IIUC) US used it for AMBER alerts and had annoyed lots of people at some point. Generally an earthquake warnings are issued by someone always automatically correlating sensors everywhere, USGS and/or NOAA in case with US, and then cellular carriers broadcasting the alert through LTE feature. This does not…

[deleted]

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#167

Post by int0x29 »

numpad0 wrote: post #74
quietthrow wrote: post #33

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…

LTE ETWS/PWS is mandatory feature, iPhones has the same thing. Maybe you've explicitly disabled it, considering (IIUC) US used it for AMBER alerts and had annoyed lots of people at some point. Generally an earthquake warnings are issued by someone always automatically correlating sensors everywhere, USGS and/or NOAA in case with US, and then cellular carriers broadcasting the alert through LTE feature. This does not…

I got shake alert via google play services. I have amber alerts on. I have gotten earthquake alerts over WEA in the past. I did not get one this time. I am pretty sure one was not issued for the 6.9 magnitude quake just the tsunami

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#168

Post by anyfoo »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #89
cossatot wrote: post #68

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.

One superfluous tsunami warning after an outlier 7.0 earthquake, and already "the system is training [you] to ignore it"?

Re: Tsunami Warning for Northern California

#170

Post by 00N8 »

colesantiago wrote: post #77

[flagged]

I don't think AGI is coming in 2025. I expect more incremental progress in AI/ML, but AGI is likely to remain vaporware & marketing hype for many years to come.

I'm not a geologist, but I do think earthquake prediction is going to get a lot better over the next century. However, this improvement will be mostly independent of AGI: The classic ML models & paradigms from a decade or 2 ago are probably adequate for the most part[1]. We just need more & better sensors & several decades to collect enough data.

[1] I'm not saying we won't develop better models & techniques that will help - I expect we will - but I predict the sensor suite & data collection period will end up carrying more weight

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