Tuesday, August 21, 2012

More Change : Earthquake notifications

Continuing on from my last post on the upcoming changes to www.geonet.org.nz, the move from human to automated earthquake location is bringing you faster information but it also means a few things will have to change.

At the moment when an earthquake is located the information is posted onto the website and then sent out to emails / twitter/ facebook etc. and this can take up to 20min.

Now SeisComP3 has an initial quake location out within a few minutes of an event, this then gets revised as more data comes in. So this is where the change comes in!

We will now be able to give you event information a lot quicker than before, but due to the 'history' of the quake and the slight change in size / location when more data comes in, the format will change.

Our GeoNet Rapid feed on Twitter has already been using this format for a while, see the pic on the right.

So you see, you will have to click the link to get all of the quake details and the final location. But you will be able to see, within a few minutes, that there was a event of xx intensity in xx area. (reminder on intensity at the bottom of the page)

From early September you will see these changes on Twitter, Facebook and emails as well as on the website.
Frequent users of GeoNet Rapid and those of you with our android /iPhone apps will be more familiar with this.

We do understand this will take a wee bit of getting used to, but you will be getting information faster than ever before!

6 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. is there any way of receiving the mag and depth on my cellphone now? i don't have a smartphone and am not always near a computer to check details, not to mention that the power is usually out after a big one. will there be follow-up tweets with details the more significant quakes?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm with Danice, can we get the mag/depth sent to Facebook like we used to? This light/MM system is hard to picture or relate to in real life, as it's like using a completely different system to measure something. Before, this person weighs 85 KG and is 183 cm tall, now it's this person is slightly bigger than the average.

    ReplyDelete
  5. We have added an 'approx. mag' to the notification, just remember they do change as more data comes in

    ReplyDelete
  6. Using an earthquakes intensity gives you a much better idea of the effects of an earthquake, this is why we are focusing more on intensity in our new website

    ReplyDelete