Friday, March 2, 2012

You asked for a faster GeoNet......

 Well next week, you get it!

 On Tuesday 6th of March our Beta website "GeoNet Rapid" goes live.  The team here at GeoNet have been working on this new system for the past year and are excited to see what you think!

The basics:
- Speed : You will be seeing details of earthquakes from around 2 minutes of their occurrence, as a computer system locates the earthquake as soon as the data arrives (rather than a person waiting for all of the data).
- Numbers : More events will be posted to the rapid site, not just the larger/more widely felt events that we put on the 'recent quakes page' (we located over 19,000 earthquakes last year, so there are plenty!)
- Regions :  Its easier to view earthquakes in your area, with options to see various regions in NZ as well as 'all' or 'felt' events.  You can also view statistics on the earthquakes in the various regions in the last week/month and year.
- History : As more data comes in, the details of an earthquake can change (magnitude/depth etc.) You can see all of these changes right up to the final location as all of the data has been received from our instruments out in the field. The first location can be made in under a minute, as the first data comes in!
- Issues:  This is a beta testing site, so things can go wrong!  Don't panic, thats why we have the test site, to discover all issues and fix them!

- Remember: geonet.org.nz is still the official source of EQ information, and our duty officers will still be locating the quakes here.
Screenshot of the 'regions' page



Links to the site will be available on the GeoNet website  on Tuesday (and on facebook / twitter etc) as well as a comprehensive news story with information from the history of the new system, to what exactly it does!

I will be giving more blog updates on how to use the website and as more features are added, and for those more g33k types out there - you may like to check out the GeoNet Development blog here.

A great example of how fast the new system will be, is shown in the diagram below comparing automatic location times and manual 'human' times to events located on the 23rd of December.
On 23 December 2011 (UTC) there were 106 earthquakes over magnitude 3 in the Canterbury region.  On average SeisComP3 (SC3) had a first automatic location two minutes after the earthquake occurred and a final automatic location after four minutes.  Compare this to the fifteen to twenty minutes it typically takes to make a manual location


In January i gave a sneak peak at the GeoNet App that we have been working on, here. We plan to have this available on the Android marketplace the following week! < and iPhone later on in the year>

3 comments:

  1. Hmm, any update on when the geonet app will be out, this week? ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. this is way better and so fast good on you guys for developing this :)

    ReplyDelete