On Monday the U.S. Geological Survey announced it was awarding a total of about $3.7 million to CWU and five other universities working to develop an early warning system.
With the funding, the USGS, Central and the other universities will collaborate to improve what is called the ShakeAlert system, a sensor and telemetry infrastructure across the West Coast.
The ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system has been in development for 10 years.
The idea is that an early warning system can give people, utilities, trains and emergency responders a precious few seconds to take action before the severe shaking waves from an earthquake arrive.
Such systems are already in place in Mexico City and Japan, where computers and communications systems alert residents. But those systems rely on seismic monitoring.
The system that CWU and the other universities are working with uses GPS technology to detect changes in the earth and is considered more reliable than traditional seismic monitoring.
Sensitive seismometers have trouble distinguishing big from really big, while GPS does not, according to CWU geological sciences professor Tim Melbourne, whose geodesy lab records hundreds of real-time GPS sensors that record even slight movements of the Earth’s crust and sends the information to CWU’s geological sciences lab in Ellensburg.
Seismometers measure how much the earth shakes, while a GPS system measures how much the earth actually moves, which can be 10 or more feet in a large quake.
When a big quake occurs, the first seismometers to detect it send the alarm. But that tends to underestimate the effect because it indicates a quake’s impact as radiating from one specific point, when in actuality; big quakes tend to occur along long fault lines.
That happened during Japan’s 2011 quake and tsunami disaster. The early-warning system worked, giving trains and other systems time to shut down and people a chance to escape to high ground. But the seismometers initially predicted a smaller quake and tsunami. Instead of a 10-foot wave, coastal areas were struck by a 100-foot wave and thousands died.
Melbourne said that when Japanese scientists looked back at their GPS data, which was not tied to the early warning system, they found more accurate initial predictions of the quake’s power.
Melbourne and his team are developing computer programs that analyze the signals from the network of 270 GPS stations so that the data can eventually help provide automatic, accurate warnings.
Under the new cooperative agreements, the USGS and its six university partners will collaborate to improve the ShakeAlert system’s sensor and telemetry infrastructure across the west coast of the United States. ShakeAlert is a new product of the USGS Advanced National Seismic System, a federation of national and regional earthquake monitoring networks throughout ?the country, including networks in Southern California, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest.
“This is an ambitious undertaking, and we are pleased that … the CWU Geodesy Lab can contribute to it,” Melbourne said in a statement Monday.
Other schools sharing in the USGS funding are: California Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; University of Oregon; University of Washington and University of Nevada Reno.
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