"Shaking in 5 seconds!" A Voluntary Smartphone-based Earthquake Early Warning System

Abstract

Public earthquake early warning systems have the potential to reduce individual risk by warning people of an incoming tremor, but their development is hampered by costly infrastructure. Furthermore, users' understanding of such a service and their reactions to warnings remains poorly studied. The Earthquake Network app turns users' smartphones into motion detectors and provides rapid information about felt earthquakes in multiple countries. It offers an alternative without the need of dedicated infrastructure in the many regions unlikely to be covered by conventional early warning systems in the foreseeable future. We show here that it already provides an early warning service, including for damaging shaking levels and although warnings are appreciated and understood by users, only a fraction follow the "drop, cover and hold" advice.

Efficacy and Usefulness of an Independent Public Earthquake Early Warning System: A Case Study—The Earthquake Network Initiative in Peru

“…By analyzing the results of a questionnaire (n = 2625) sent to EQN users following a warning issued for an M 8.0 earthquake that hit Peru in 2019, we assess how the system's characteristics affected users' perceptions and responses to the warning. This piece of research complements a previous article (Bossu et al, 2021) that focused on EQN's technical performance and showed that despite a good understanding of the warning, only 25% of respondents took protective action.…”

“…1). If not too close to the detection point, users may then receive a warning in advance of the seismic wave that causes the shaking and thus benefit from an earthquake early warning (EEW) (Finazzi, 2016;Bossu et al, 2021). The EQN app is free to download, available in eight languages, and can be run all over the globe.…”

“…No information on the expected intensity, earthquake magnitude, or safety tips are part of the warning message. The app sends alerts for felt earthquakes that can be received by users who will not feel the earthquake, which is especially true for small-magnitude earthquakes (Bossu et al, 2021). The warning is sent in the language chosen by the user.…”

“…Citizens are also becoming a key part in the emerging PEEW system in Aotearoa New Zealand (Tan et al, 2021). They are already deeply involved with earthquake network (EQN), the first demonstrated, voluntary, and smartphone-based PEEW system (Bossu et al, 2021). Smartphones are also used in fixed locations in the new ASTUTI PEEW network in Costa Rica (Brooks et al, 2021).…”

“Saving Precious Seconds”—A Novel Approach to Implementing a Low-Cost Earthquake Early Warning System with Node-Level Detection and Alert Generation

“…In addition, the decentralised EEW sensor network architecture proposed in this paper shows that the detection of earthquakes and processing of ground-motion data can successfully be implemented at the sensor node. This research explored and implemented an experimental EEW system by employing 100% decentralised processing compared to the currently available EEW approaches based on centralised processing [8,11,41,87]. Even though Fischer and colleagues proposed a decentralised EEW approach, there are no clear findings of the robustness of their system [15].…”