Overview Understanding

As a relative newbie to the Raspberry Shake ecosystem I’m still learning to walk before I can run but enjoying the journey so far. I’ve learnt so much about Seismology, it’s a brilliant initiative, thank you to all involved.

It’s taken me four months of perseverance to put in an Ethernet cable (surprising number of hurdles) but finally this week I connected up & now no more dropped wifi packets :slight_smile: This allows me to move forward to try rsudp & perhaps even some of sheeny’s code contributions when time permits - note to self GitHub - sheeny72/RPiSandB: Python programs for Raspberry Shake and Boom seismometers and infrasound detectors. .

What really caught my imagination about the Raspberry Shake project is that for capital outlay, some ongoing bandwidth and electricity I’m part of a citizen science project which may help improve quality of life, even save lives or at the very least inspire someone to work in this area to these ends.

This post is partly motivated by my question M 2.7 Cornwall - Nothing on Shake Network as I’m trying to understand how the system works. Initially I thought earthquake plots were determined from analysed shake data and given other messages on this forum perhaps that was once the case but possibly not now? Around the same time as my posting I stumbled upon https://quakelink.raspberryshake.org/ which I followed to http://www.gempa.de/ and installed the EQInfo app*** (integrates with Raspberry Shake). Seems this is an aggregator for a large number of agencies but guessing what the Shake network uses as its earthquake source data? This seems to fit as it too was missing the Cornwall event. The only agency I couldn’t see in the list was the British Geological Survey (BGS) Earthquakes around the British Isles in the last 60 days (perhaps agency is the wrong term here) which publishes a feed Online data feeds & this obviously did have the info given the BBC used it as their reference. Not sure why the BGS isn’t included in EQInfo but probably a question outside the scope of this topic.

Something that might become apparent on the other thread is Stormchaser’s point “only the manually reviewed events appear on our current lists/maps”. Does this literally mean some poor souls have to review every event before they are published?

As I said relative newbie trying to understand how it all works but once I have a complete overview minutiae flows more easily. Apologies if I have it wrong or answers are already published elsewhere, I may have read them previously but can’t recall & feel asking directly would be of more benefit.

One last question. When using DataView is the data (Multi-Stream Display, 24-Hour Display, Live Data View) coming off the Raspberry Shake servers or is it coming directly from the shake station? Guessing the former.

*** As well as the EQInfo app have also installed ShakeNet and LastQuake.

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Hello Hadders,

Firstly, a clarification. The data we use does not come from EQInfo, but from a concatenation of publicly available earthquake information and all the data the Raspberry Shakes installed on our network provide. The next question could be: why integrate all those different data sources instead of using only RS ones?

The answer is: network density.

We intend for the RS network itself to be used progressively more and more to detect more and more earthquakes over time to lowet and lower magnitudes as the network densifies. Density is the key to “unlocking” this ability.

Also, naturally, as we are integrating other data, we need to properly cite them, thus the updated source information in StationView (and soon on our ShakeNet App).

Regarding this:

Does this literally mean some poor souls have to review every event before they are published?

That is correct, it’s still how seismology is done nowadays. Naturally, technology helps, and helps a lot, but the human hand and mind are still required and essential to crosscheck and verify everything.

Onto this:

When using DataView is the data (Multi-Stream Display, 24-Hour Display, Live Data View) coming off the Raspberry Shake servers or is it coming directly from the shake station?

The data in DataView, StationView, and the ShakeNet App is coming from our RS servers. With all systems green, the delay between real-time data acquisition and display is absent or negligible, so there is virtually no difference in getting data remotely from the servers or directly from the Shake itself.

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