Towards Global Earthquake Early Warning with the MyShake Smartphone Seismic Network
Abstract
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. We present this network detection algorithm, a simulation platform to test earthquake scenarios at various locations around the world and discuss the release of the new MyShake 2.0 in summer 2019.
Tests of the detection algorithm on real events recorded by the MyShake network demonstrate the utility of our approach. However, due to the present sparseness of the network in most parts of the world, we require the simulation platform to understand and evaluate the system's performance in various tectonic settings. We assume that 0.1% of the population has the MyShake mobile application installed on their smartphone, and use historical earthquakes from the last 20 years to simulate triggering scenarios with different network configurations in various regions. Then, we run the detection algorithm with these simulated triggers to understand the performance of the system. According to the simulations, our system performs best in regions featuring high population densities and onshore, upper crustal earthquakes M<7.0. In these cases, alerts can be generated ~4-6 sec after the origin time, magnitude errors are within ~0.5 magnitude units, and epicenters are typically within 10 km of true locations. When the events are offshore or in sparsely populated regions, the alerts are slower and the uncertainties in magnitude and location increase. Furthermore, even with 0.01% of the population as the MyShake users, in regions of high population density, the system still performs well for earthquakes larger than M5.5.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.S51C..02M
- Keywords:
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- 4341 Early warning systems;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 7212 Earthquake ground motions and engineering seismology;
- SEISMOLOGY;
- 7215 Earthquake source observations;
- SEISMOLOGY