Quake-Catcher Aims to be Largest Distributed Seismometer Network

Nature is reporting that a new distributed computing application is looking to monitor earthquake data using the accelerometer in many computing devices. In the long run, "Quake-Catcher" will hopefully be fast enough to give warning before major earthquakes. "If it works, it will be the cheapest seismic network on the planet and could operate in any country. It wouldn't be as sensitive as traditional networks of seismometers, but Lawrence says that's not the point. 'If you have only two sensors in an area, you have to have a perfect system. If you have 15 sensors in a system it [can] be less perfect. One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand -- your need for the system to be perfect becomes much smaller,' he says. 'That's really our approach -- just to have massive numbers.'"

Comments

Re:Great vaporware application

[Eivind Eklund]

There are techniques for extracting higher quality data from overlapping low-resolution data sets. In the visual space, it's obvious that this is possible: If you have a single low-res camera, a static photographic subject, and full control of movement you can move a camera less than a pixel for reach picture taken (in a controlled way). Then you get sub-pixel-resolution data plus noise in the resulting difference set between different pictures. If you have ENOUGH difference sets, you can cancel out the noise. You then get sub-pixel resolution.

To extend this to a domain where you don't have the effective control, you have to automatically detect where different pictures fit. I remember having seen somebody that did this; I can't remember where, though.

Eivind.