Measuring earthquake shaking with the Community Seismic Network
Thursday, September 4, 2014 - 07:05
in Earth & Climate
In 2011, the Community Seismic Network (CSN) began taking data from small, inexpensive accelerometers in the greater Pasadena area. Able to measure both weak and strong ground movement along three axes, these accelerometers promise to provide very high-resolution data of shaking produced by seismic activity in the region. "We have quite a large deployment of these accelerometers, about 400 sensors now, in people's homes but also in schools and businesses, and in some high-rise buildings downtown," says Julian Bunn, principal computational scientist for Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research. "We run client software on each sensor that sends data up into Google's cloud. From there we can analyze the data from all these sensors."