Australian Quakes Bogus or Errors?

[sheeny]

Over the last few days I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see more Australian quakes appearing in the events list on the ShakeNet App, however, I noticed they all have a magnitude of 0.0. Curious I checked against the EarthquakesGA site and none of the events in the ShakeNet events correspond to those registered by EarthquakesGA either in time or position.

Curiosity being what it is, I’ve just checked against the event list in StationView and they don’t seem to appear there at all.

I’m happy if work is happening to include more Australian quakes in ShakeNet, but the behaviour ATM seems pretty weird. Is it just a bug?

Al.

[Stormchaser]

Hello sheeny,

Could you please attach a couple of screenshots of these events so that I can pass them to our team to make a couple of checks?

The behaviour seems strange indeed, and any information that you can provide is definitely welcome.

Thank you!

[sheeny]

Screenshots from my phone:

Do you want screenshots of the StationView Event list (where all the ones I checked DON’T appear)? I presume that should be pretty much the same for all users.

Here’s a screenshot of the EarthquakesGA page (I’ve included the URL FYI):

Al.

[sheeny]

I haven’t checked all these 0.0 Aussie quakes. I only checked 3 or 4 of the closest ones that were most recent (trying to cross reference distance from the phone list against date in the StationView event list), but once I started looking I realised there’s more of them than I thought.

Al.

[sheeny]

In case it helps here’s all the 0.0 quakes this morning:

Seems a high proportion are Australia , PNG and Indonesia.

Al.

[Stormchaser]

Thank you so much for all the data you provided sheeny, this is a really strange phenomenon.

I have opened a ticket for our team to check this up and see what is causing this particular behavior. For now, as a temporary fix, I would advise you to move the filter a bit higher than 0.0 magnitude, so you will have a cleaner list.

I wull update here as soon as I have news, or a fix is ready.

[weaksignals]

Hi Sheeny,
I may not be able to answer your question directly but may be able to provide an alternate way for you to cross check Australian quake detections, other than via GA’s website.

Peter Gray

[sheeny]

How’s that Peter?

Al.

[weaksignals]

Hi again sheeny,
Sorry about the capital S, I didn’t mean to shout.
I have included a couple of links below that may be of some assistance to you. The Geoscience Australia website is a good resource for larger earthquakes within the region but they don’t appear to be that interested in anything smaller than about 2.5ML.

https://earthquakes.mappage.net.au/n.php , https://earthquakes.mappage.net.au/q.php , eqServer , http://cqsrg.org/psn/fdsnws/ .

The last link is to a new resource (less than a week old) which you might find very useful for your meteor infrasound work, if used with some other software available for free on the web.

If you want to discuss this further (it is a bit off topic), please contact me via the messages function.

Peter

[sheeny]

Thanks for the links,Peter. I didn’t realise GA were so selective about quakes.

I’ll have a good look at the links.

Al.

[HowieL]

There was a mag 4 a few days ago in West Aust but none of the 5 Aust stations that I monitor displayed any traces. They each span their wheels for a couple of seconds and displayed a normal view but with no trace.
Weird…