Crowdsourced earthquake early warning

Creators: Minson, Sarah E.; Brooks, Benjamin A.; Glennie, Craig L.; Murray, Jessica R.; Langbein, John O.; Owen, Susan E.; Heaton, Thomas H.; Iannucci, Robert A.; Hauser, Darren L.

Abstract

Earthquake early warning (EEW) can reduce harm to people and infrastructure from earthquakes and tsunamis, but it has not been implemented in most high earthquake-risk regions because of prohibitive cost. Common consumer devices such as smartphones contain low-cost versions of the sensors used in EEW. Although less accurate than scientific-grade instruments, these sensors are globally ubiquitous. Through controlled tests of consumer devices, simulation of an M_w (moment magnitude) 7 earthquake on California's Hayward fault, and real data from the M_w 9 Tohoku-oki earthquake, we demonstrate that EEW could be achieved via crowdsourcing.

Additional Information

2015 © The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). Submitted 10 January 2015; Accepted 6 March 2015; Published 10 April 2015. We thank B. Atwater, E. Cochran, B. Ellsworth, J. Foster, G. Fryer, R. Stein, C. Wolfe, and two anonymous reviewers for discussion and reviews. Funding: This work was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey Innovation Center for Earth Sciences, U.S. Department of Transportation Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology grant RITARS-14-H-HOU awarded to the University of Houston, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Author contributions: S.E.M. wrote the manuscript, created the figures, and designed and performed the analyses; B.A.B. led the project, cowrote the manuscript, performed device tests, and helped design the analyses; C.L.G. performed device tests, helped design the analyses, and wrote the Kalman filter code; J.R.M. performed device tests and helped design the analyses; J.O.L. performed device tests and the noise analysis; S.E.O. processed the Tohoku C/A code data; T.H.H. helped design the analyses; R.A.I. helped design the analyses; and D.L.H. performed device tests. Competing interests: Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government.

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