The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) is a transformative approach to earthquake detection, science, and outreach. The QCN is a distributed computing project that links internal (no cost, built-in) or external (low cost, USB-based) accelerometers connected to any participating computer for earthquake research. Leveraging an innovative set of cyber-enabled seismic observations, this approach will enable the creation of a very dense, low-cost seismic network that can explore earthquake fault rupture in real-time, establish ground response to seismic wave passage, and quantify the shaking effects on critical structures. Results from a one-year exploratory grant from the NSF Cyber-Infrastructure Teaching, Education, Advancement and Mentoring program indicate QCN has the ability to be a new and transformative type of network, which is scalable and easy to deploy world-wide. Increasing the number of QCN sensors from 1,000 to more than 30,000 worldwide and developing efficient schemes to ingest, process, and distribute Terabytes of data will allow us to (1) explore fault mechanics (including directionality, slip distribution, and rupture velocity) at unprecedented resolutions, (2) study ground motions to assess seismic hazard and building response and (3) analyze data in real time for earthquake early warning and rapid response. This proposal will result in network with 6,000 new USB sensors and tens of thousands of no-cost sensors commonly built internal to laptops and other devices. Additionally, QCN will provide the cyberinfrastructure to process and analyze the large new seismic data sets in near-real time and to foster collaboration between 1000?s of researchers and interested participants around the world. The framework laid by this project will enable rapid expansion of the network internationally and will allow us to grow the network at a fraction of the cost of traditional seismic instrumentation and infrastructure, providing valuable data to augment the existing seismic networks.The success of the Quake-Catcher Network is intrinsically linked to the broader participation of the general public; members of the public, schools (K-12, undergraduate and graduate), and community organizations host QCN sensors. These ?citizen-scientists? will receive real-time earthquake information, seismic data and results, and interactive educational materials.
The purpose of this project was to explore the possible use of consumer-grade accelerometers to record ground shaking from earthquakes. Possible uses of this data inlcude studies of earthquake structure, earthquake processes, and providing realtime information and alerts prior to damaging ground shaking. We explored the use of data from the accelerometers in computers, from USB accelerometers connected to computers, and accelerometers in smartphones. We found that smartphone accelerometers are sensitive enough to record earthquake of magnitude 5 or larger within ~10 km of the phone. We also found that we can use on-phone processing to distinguish between earthquake shaking and every-day motions of the phone with a 99.7% sucess rate. We have now developed an app that is suitale to be rolled out to a few thousand users to trigger on eearthquake shaking and send the data collected back to a central surver. We plan to test this over the coming months. As such we fin this to be a very promising result and we plan to continue to explore the use of smarthphones in the future. This resarch has shown that it may be possible to harness the data from millions of phones in the future. This would represent a four orders of magnitue incrrease in the amount of seismic data available.
