As an enthusiastic armchair amateur earthquake seeker with 55 years of geological experience living in an aseismic suburban milieu (versus a professional seismologist with a seismic vault network designing the next shake early warning service), I thought I’d take the time to share how I learned (the hard way) to get meaning from my RS3D over a six month operating period, focused on the ShakeNet app run on an iPad, backed up with the RS:local connection to my RS3D set in Standalone mode (due to bandwidth constraints(.
How I use the ShakeNet app / rs:local today: Use Case - “As-Is"
Every day begins by logging into the CSEM/EM “LastQuake” app and searching the SIGNIFICANT tab for large (4+) North American quakes which may appear above the hum of suburban noise and passing transcontinental freight trains. Then I tab across to the NEAR ME tab to seek out regional earthquakes M3+ at a maximum of 1000 km from my location.
Next I open the ShakeNet app at the EVENTS tab, set to SORT by date, FILTER-ed by M2+, all depths, 0-1 day ago, at a maximum of 5000 km from my location. Then I seek out events of significance within mental range rings (see below)
- Any M2+ event within a 250 km radius
- Any M3+event within 500 km radius
- Any M4+ events within that 5000 km radius
Whenever I find events, I go to my network of local stations usually within 500 km of my RS3D. My network radiates out towards known seismically hyperactive sources of potential events. Then I visually validate if classic P & S signatures are visible above background on their RS’s, and judge how well the predicted arrival time algorithm worked. If one of my network successfully sees the “signal over the noise”, I then manually connect to my RS3D using RS:local, and manually download the helicorder traces for the that interval one by one, and visually inspect the traces, starting with vertical signal. If I think I can see Z signal over my suburban noise, then I inspect the N & E traces for confirmation. I then save these helicorder images as files in my private "Seismic Events Detected” folder for later reference.
Lastly, in the absence of real events, I look at the vertical signal, and look for noise patterns and see if I can postulate a man-made source, e.g., garbage truck, street sweeping, roadworks, train, boat, thunderstorm, etc.
How I hope to use the ShakeNet app / rs:local in future versions : Use Case - “To-Be”
I would like to be able to program my “seism-ecosystem” haloes into ShakeNet, as in, “Show me all events":
- All M2+ events within a “250" km radius, then show me…
- All M3+ events with a “500 km” radius, then show me…
- All M4+ events within a “1000" km radius, and then show me…
- All M5+ events globally
Also when I use RS:local, I would like to be able to select helicorder downloads from the last XX hours for all traces loaded into separate browser windows, to remove the back & forth manually pulling helicorder records in twelve hour tranches.
I’m pragmatic enough with sufficient 1970’s programming experience to know that these features require time, talent & treasure to deliver, but use-cases will always assist business analysts develop value-added functionality. Thanks!