Earthquake early warning systems has been proven to save countless lives in Japan, Mexico, and Chile, where earthquake warnings are often broadcast live on TV up to a minute before residents experience shaking.
Unfortunately, traditional early warning systems require extensive capital investment. The high cost of traditional earthquake early-warning systems and limited budgets prevent earthquake-prone developing countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Ghana, Nigeria, Columbia, Venezuela, and Bolivia from building traditional earthquake warning systems.
This project describes repurposing old Android smartphones into affordable dedicated seismometers to detect tremors. These smartphones have become disposable items and are continuously "upgraded" and replaced. Yet every one of these devices includes everything needed to act as a dedicated seismometer: Wi-Fi capability, GPS, and an accelerometer. The software developed for this project converts these smartphones into dedicated seismometers and uses existing web technologies for telemetry services. This system would also trigger alerts to all devices that have the software installed whenever a tremor is detected, effectively making each seismic detection station double as an earthquake early-warning alarm.
A large network of these seismic detection stations will effectively create an affordable earthquake early-warning system that can be rapidly implemented at an extremely low cost. It would provide developing nations an affordable life-saving alternative to expensive traditional earthquake early-warning systems. This solution is cheap, keeps old smartphones from landfills, and will save lives.
Earthquakes are major hazards to humans, buildings and infrastructure. Early warning methods aim to provide advance notice of incoming strong shaking to enable preventive action and mitigate seismic risk. Their usefulness depends on accuracy, the relation between true, missed and false alerts, and timeliness, the time between a warning and the arrival of strong shaking. Current approaches suffer from apparent aleatoric uncertainties due to simplified modelling or short warning times. Here we propose a novel early warning method, the deep-learning based transformer earthquake alerting model (TE…
Geodetic earthquake early warning (EEW) algorithms complement point-source seismic systems by estimating fault-finiteness and unsaturated moment magnitude for the largest, most damaging earthquakes. Because such earthquakes are rare, it has been difficult to demonstrate that geodetic warnings improve ground motion estimation significantly. Here, we quantify and compare timeliness and accuracy of magnitude and ground motion estimates in simulated real time from seismic and geodetic observations for a suite of globally-distributed, large earthquakes. Magnitude solutions saturate for the seismic …
The MyShake project aims to build a global smartphone seismic network to facilitate large-scale earthquake early warning and other applications by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing. The MyShake mobile application first detects earthquake shaking on a single phone. The earthquake is then confirmed on the MyShake servers using a "network detection" algorithm that is activated by multiple single-phone detections. In this part one of the two paper series, we present a network detection algorithm and a simulation platform to test earthquake scenarios at various locations around the world. The p…
Smartphone-based earthquake early warning systems implemented by citizen science initiatives are characterized by a significant variability in their smartphone network geometry. This has an direct impact on the earthquake detection capability and performance of the system. Here, a simulation framework based on the Monte Carlo method is implemented for making inference on relevant quantities of the earthquake detection such as the detection distance from the epicentre, the detection delay and the warning time for people exposed to high ground shaking levels. The framework is applied to Haiti, w…
Early earthquake warning is a rapidly developing capability that has significant ramifications for many fields, including astronomical observatories. In this work, we describe the susceptibility of astronomical facilities to seismic events, including large telescopes as well as second-generation ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers. We describe the potential warning times for observatories from current seismic networks and propose locations for future seismometers to maximize warning times.
East China University of Technology（东华理工大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Earthquake early warning systems are required to report earthquake locations and magnitudes as quickly as possible before the damaging S wave arrival to mitigate seismic hazards. Deep learning techniques provide potential for extracting earthquake source information from full seismic waveforms instead of seismic phase picks. We developed a novel deep learning earthquake early warning system that utilizes fully convolutional networks to simultaneously detect earthquakes and estimate their source parameters from continuous seismic waveform streams. The system determines earthquake location and m…
Public earthquake early warning systems have the potential to reduce individual risk by warning people of an incoming tremor but their development has been hampered by costly infrastructure. Furthermore, users' understanding of such a service and their reactions to warnings remains poorly studied. The smartphone app of the Earthquake Network initiative turns users' smartphones into motion detectors and provides the first example of purely smartphone-based earthquake early warnings, without the need for dedicated seismic station infrastructure and operating in multiple countries. We demonstrate…
The MyShake project aims to build a global smartphone seismic network to facilitate large-scale earthquake early warning and other applications by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing. The MyShake mobile application first detects earthquake shaking on a single phone. The earthquake is then confirmed on the MyShake servers using a "network detection" algorithm that is activated by multiple single-phone detections. In part two of this two paper series, we report the first order performance of MyShake's Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) capability in various selected locations around the world. Due…
Smartphone-based earthquake early warning systems (EEWS) are emerging as a complementary solution to classic EEWS based on expensive scientific-grade instruments. Smartphone-based systems, however, are characterized by a highly dynamic network geometry and by noisy measurements. Thus the need to control the probability of false alarm and the probability of missed detection. This paper proposes a statistical approach based on the maximum likelihood method to address this challenge and to jointly estimate in near real-time earthquake parameters like epicentre and depth. The approach is tested us…
Fast and accurate magnitude prediction is the key to the success of earthquake early warning. We have proposed a new approach based on deep learning for P-wave magnitude prediction (EEWNet), which takes time series data as input instead of feature parameters. The architecture of EEWNet is adaptively adjusted according to the length of the input, thus eliminates the need of complicated tuning of hyperparameters for deep learning. Only the unfiltered accelerograms of vertical components are used. EEWNet is trained on a moderate number of data set (10,000s of records), but it achieves excellent r…
Survival modelling of smartphone trigger data for earthquake parameter estimation in early warning. With applications to 2023 Turkish-Syrian and 2019 Ridgecrest events
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；Università degli Studi di Bergamo（贝加莫大学）；Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore（天主教撒克罗库雷大学）
Ruptures of the largest earthquakes can last between a few seconds and several minutes. An early assessment of the final earthquake size is essential for early warning systems. However, it is still unclear when in the rupture history this final size can be predicted. Here we introduce a probabilistic view of rupture evolution - how likely is the event to become large - allowing for a clear and well-founded answer with implications for earthquake physics and early warning. We apply our approach to real time magnitude estimation based on either moment rate functions or broadband teleseismic P ar…
Leveraging LLMs and Social Media to Understand User Perception of Smartphone-Based Earthquake Early Warnings
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学地球与行星科学系）；Google LLC（谷歌公司）；Seismological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校地震实验室）；Google Germany GmbH（谷歌德国公司）
A promising perspective is presented that humans can provide hourly warning for strong land earthquakes (EQs, Ms6). Two important atmospheric electrostatic signal features are described. A table that lists 9 strong land EQs with shock time, epicenter, magnitude, weather in the region near the epicenter, precursor beginning time, and precursor duration demonstrates that at approximately several hours to one day before a strong land EQ, the weather conditions are fair near the epicenter, and an abnormal negative atmospheric electrostatic signal is very obvious. Moreover, the mechanism is explain…
Performance and User Response of Android's Smartphone-Based Alerts in the 2025 Marmara Ereglisi Earthquake
Google LLC（谷歌有限责任公司）；Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学地球与行星科学系）；Google Germany GmbH（谷歌德国有限公司）；Seismological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校地震实验室）
Ground mass is redistributed during an earthquake causing the local gravitational potential to change. These gravitational fluctuations travel at the speed of light meaning they will arrive at a remote location significantly earlier than the fastest seismic waves. If these gravitational signals are measured by a gravimeter then early warning can be provided for an imminent earthquake. Earlier detection of earthquakes could be used to protect crucial infrastructure and save lives. The Torsion Pendulum Dual Oscillator (TorPeDO) is a gravity gradient sensor that has been constructed at the Austra…
MyShake is a free citizen science smartphone app that provides a range of features related to earthquakes. Features available globally include rapid post-earthquake notifications, live maps of earthquake damage as reported by MyShake users, safety tips and various educational features. The app also uses the accelerometer to detect earthquake shaking and to record and submit waveforms to a central archive. In addition, MyShake delivers earthquake early warning alerts in California, Oregon and Washington. In this study we compare the felt shaking reports provided by MyShake users in California w…
