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Quake Felt Report

Nick Horspool's picture
Submitted by Nick Horspool on May 25, 2011 - 18:05
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Melbourne

Crowd sourced earthquake intensity maps provide disaster managers with real-time information on the intensity of earthquakes while also giving earthquake researchers valuable data to help estimate the shaking from future earthquakes. The Geoscience Australia Felt Report website and the USGS "Did you feel it" website are good examples of such crowd sourced maps. However these maps are tailored for the web browser on desktop computers.


The goal is to create a smartphone app that will allow users to report earthquake shaking intensity and building damage information via their smartphone. This would entail creating an earthquake felt report form in which the users answers a set of questions of the level of shaking and damage to the building they are in. This information is then geolocated using the smartphones GPS and submitted to a database. The earthquake intensity and damage information is then displayed on a webmap for real-time analysis by disaster managers and the public.

Example: 
A magnitude 6.5 earthquake strikes Adelaide in South Australia. Steve pulls out his smartphone and opens his EQReport app and quickly fills out the felt report. He then takes a photo of the front of his office where a large crack has formed and submits the report. At the same time Sarah, a disaster manager, opens her web browser and navigates to the earthquake report webpage where she can see a map of the earthquake intensity reports from hundreds of people across the city who have submitted reports. She can click on a single data point to view the photo of damage submitted by the user. A few weeks later, David a seismologist uses the intensity information to refine his models that predict the ground shaking from earthquakes in Australia.
Extra Credit: 
Allow users to upload photos of earthquake damage taken from their phone.
Similar Projects and Resources: 

Geoscience Australia


USGS

Next Steps and Sustainability: 
This could be incorporated into Geoscience Australia's Earthquake Felt Reports to compliment the browser based version.

Comments

What if instead of relying on humans rating quakes, we relied on automated, cheap, cellphone-based hardware (solar power, accelerometers, good processing capability, network connectivity) to measure soil movement, quakes, ambient noise and whatever we can measure and send those measurements to servers for collection and analysis? Such a network could be used for a variety of purposes, from disaster prevention (soil movement on slopes triggering evacuation procedures) to network access in disaster zones (local wifi mini-hotspots connected to the cellular network)
Ricardo Bánffy May 26, 2011

BTW, the sensor thing is an extension of the "plan B" mentioned on the original wiki:


http://wiki.rhok.org/Enxuga_Enchente


There is a presentation at http://ig.com/osps

Ricardo Bánffy May 26, 2011

We can make a HTML5 widget (will run on Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac and Linux) that can connect with a LAMP server to store and retrieve data. This can be used for more than one kind of disaster. The person who reports a disaster has to enter general details about his surrounding. The widget will collect the reporter's location using the HTML5 Geolocation API. This is then sent to the server for storage. The server on first receiving a report, registers a disaster type (eg.: earthquake, flood, tsunami, etc.) and stores the reporter's details against it. Then on subsequent reports reported within the next 24 hours, the server checks if they are the same type (earthquake, flood, etc) and then if the report are of same type and they come in from within 20 kilometers (this can be calculated using Vincenty's formula) from the distance of another reporter who reported earlier, then the received report is stored against the same disaster event, else a new disaster event is registered. This can help because the information would be organized around individual disastrous events, not around individual reports. This can help in organizing data based on disaster-type and location if (God forbid) different kinds of reports from different parts of the world fly in together. The report viewer, which will be a part of the same widget, will retrieve the information in two parts : 1. First it displays a list of registered events (not individual reports), no. of reports against that event and distance (from mid-point... again Vincenty) from the client. 2. On selecting an event, a list of all reports and their details (distance from client, info, etc.) are displayed. If a report gets 3 fake votes from within 10 kms of where it was registered, it can be automatically deleted. One more good thing about widgets (apart from being relatively easy to make) is that they can be ported easily.
Syed Ibtisam Tauhidi May 27, 2011

What if you used user's cell phones (background apps in Android) and after eliminating the standard deviation of everybody is walking / commuting / driving, the accelerometers (on tables / desks / bed stands) would concur about the intensity of the quake.

That turns this more into an automated weekend project.

stephenreid Jun 03, 2011

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