Low-cost community-based earthquake warning system under development in New Zealand

A ground-braking, low-cost, earthquake early-warning system is being developed in New Zealand. The community-based project is a collaboration between the New Zealand Earthquake Commission (EQC) and Massey University.

The project consists of the distribution of low-cost seismometers to various communities and is spearheaded by the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University. The project team hopes to create “citizen seismologists” who could help create and test the earthquake early warning sensor network. While the warning system under development may only provide a 10 seconds notice, this may be sufficient for people to perform the ‘drop, cover and hold’ safety actions. The project is a continuation of a previous EQC research by Dr Julia Becker from Massey University. Becker found that there is strong interest among New Zealand residents, businesses and agencies in an early warning system for earthquakes.

Lead researcher, Raj Prasanna from Massey University stated: “At present, there is no earthquake early warning system in New Zealand. [ ]we want to explore the feasibility of developing an early warning system for earthquakes informed by low-cost internet-based seismometers. The sensors would be installed in community owned buildings to generate appropriate warning solutions for members of the community.”

The research team is also trying to accommodate the residents’ thoughts and concerns within the overall goals of the project. For that reason, the researchers recently met with residents in Lower Hutt.

“Ideally, the sensors hosted by the citizen seismologists would be configured as a network of sensors to test different detection algorithms,” Prasanna said. “The data gathered from the community will help us explore the feasibility of generating warnings using these low-cost sensors.”

The research team is currently testing several ready-made low-cost sensors which will be inter-connected through an internet-based network.