QuakeFinder Blog

On Thursday Feb 11, 2016, QuakeFinder will participate in a panel hosted by CITRIS and UC Berkeley:


For event info, visit this link.

QuakeFinder and NASA have teamed on a crowdsourcing ‘Quest For Quakes’ competition. Contestants from around the world will compete to develop algorithms capable of identifying Earth-emitting electromagnetic (EM) signals known to be present in the days and weeks before M 5+ earthquakes. An award pool of $25,000 is available for those that develop winning approaches. The contest runs from July 27, 2015 through August 9, 2015.

QuakeFinder is a Humanitarian R&D effort aimed at developing an Earthquake early warning forecast capability. Since 2000, we have installed and operated 165 sensor suites along known earthquake fault lines in California, Peru, Chile, Greece, Indonesia, and Taiwan, collecting and analyzing the EM data before and after earthquakes.

In this phase of the project, we are developing algorithms to extract the unique pulses known to occur in the weeks and days ahead of moderate-to-large earthquakes. Our ultimate goal is to enable an early warning system – and save lives.

The ‘Quest For Quakes’ competitors are provided a subset of our data and have two weeks to develop code to autonomously detect EM signals in the presence of other EM noise. We expect over 100 participants to compete.

If you or someone in your organization would like to join, please visit the TopCoder site.

This is a very exciting initiative for QuakeFinder and our thanks go to the NASA Tournament Lab, Appirio, and Amazon Web Services for their invaluable contributions to this effort.

Also see: NASA’s Press Release

QuakeFinder was awarded the VIA SAT Humanitarian Excellence Award for 2015 at the recent Satellite 2015 Conference in Washington DC. The award is given to a company or group that uses satellites to promote the welfare of mankind. In this case QuakeFinder uses both ground (QuakeFinder 165 site Magnetometer network) and space( the GOES weather satellite’s IR camera) to develop a system to forecast large earthquakes days before they happen. This research is ongoing and is refining a system to detect these devastating earthquakes, and ultimately to save lives. Congratulations to the QuakeFinder Team (below)  

Space weather affects us on earth and it manifests itself as larger northern light displays, as potential satellite damage, and as potential power outages due to induced currents in power lines. QuakeFinder’s network is able to show how much the magnetic disturbances affect specific areas in California, based on the differences in ground conductivity.     Example 1 Before the solar storm started: Green bars are magnetic index form NOAA space weather website. Green means that there is low solar activity and low magnetic disturbances on earth.   Red plot is the North-South magnetometer at our Parkfield site in central California. Green plot is the East-West magnetometer at Parkfield. Blue plot is the vertical magnetometer at Parkfield. 24 hours across the time axis (Pacific Standard Time and UTC time).       Example 2  During the solar storm where a large signal is observed at a location where there is a known salt water submerged lake (Parkfield): Yellow and red bars show the level of a large magnetic storm (Magnetic index Kp from NOAA Space Weather website). .     These same signals are observed at all our magnetometer sites, but some are lower than others due to ground conductivity. Example 3  During the solar storm but where a smaller signal is observed at a site in a dry mountainous area: