A Quake Warning, Before It Strikes

A 10-second warning may not sound like much, but when it comes to earthquakes, it's enough time to take cover.

With the magnitude 6.0 earthquake in California’s wine country still fresh in everyone’s memory, there is an increased interest in building a warning system that will alert people quickly about the possibility of a tremor on the way, said Richard Allen, director of the Seismological Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

The university and Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories are looking into the possibility that a smartphone app could send out alerts of coming quakes to cellphone users, giving them precious seconds of lead time before a tremor.

The MyShake app, still being tested, uses smartphone accelerometers and locaters to augment the information on quakes that comes from 400 seismometers in California, Mr. Allen said. Eventually, the app could warn users and provide huge amounts of additional data on earthquakes, he said.

The school already has had some success with ShakeAlert, a desktop program that uses data from the seismometers to send warnings to about 150 registered test users. It gave a five-second warning during the recent quake near Napa, Calif., to users in Berkeley 25 miles away, Mr. Allen said.

source - nytimes