[time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning

Tom Van Baak tvb at LeapSecond.com
Sat Apr 28 22:32:24 UTC 2012


Brooke,

Right, an overloaded accelerometer is a problem -- if you have
only one or a few of them.

But the beauty of using cellular sites is that you have hundreds
or thousands of them across populated areas; so it's no problem
if the a bunch of sensors near the epicenter overload. A clipped
signal is not worthless; at least you know something big happened
there; you can rely on slightly more distant cell tower sensors to
get readings a few seconds later that are less clipped or not clipped
at all. (There's another solution I heard about -- using smartphones
as a tiered network of synchronized accelerometers).

A high rate GPS solution sounds really cool to me but I bet its also
far more expensive.

Related to that, are there any seismometer experts on the list? I've
always wondered why they don't augment the extremely sensitive
detectors with less sensitive detectors? Of course a really good
detector will overload; so just co-locate cheap detectors that are 40
and 80 dB less sensitive. That way you get a clean signal no matter
how close or far the epicenter is from the detector.

/tvb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brooke Clarke" <brooke at pacific.net>
To: "Tom Van Baak" <tvb at LeapSecond.com>; "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2012 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] GPS, USGS Early Earthquake Warning


> Hi Tom:
> 
> The USGS talk was the first time I'd heard about the need to look at an earthquake as happening along some length of 
> fault line.  For the big quake in Japan the forecast software assumed a point source for the quake and that cause them 
> to under estimate the magnitude and get other things wrong.  GPS is part of the solution to get better results.
> 
> In the S. CA example he showed a 180 mile long rupture of the San Andreas fault.  At 2 miles a second the quake would 
> last about 90 seconds.
> Accelerometers that are not right on top of the fault will be overloaded with signals coming from each location where 
> there's a fracture and so the data will be nearly impossible to untangle in a short time frame.  But a GPS receiver will 
> show a DC displacement that unambiguous.
> 
> Have Fun,
> 
> Brooke Clarke





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