Close

Nearby Tremor in Knoxville

A project log for Device for Seismic Noise Analysis

Could a digital device to analyze the statistics of the magnitude and 3-D origins of seismic noise predict some local earthquakes?

michael-doodyMichael Doody 08/25/2017 at 21:400 Comments

About an hour ago, a small 2.5 magnitude tremor event happened several miles to the Northwest of our machine. I felt and heard it - it seemed like thunder some distance away. The rumbling persisted for quite a while. Here is the recording from the local USGS machine - there was no significant activity prior to the event on the local machines.


Here is the location of the event, according to the University of Memphis earthquake center, in relation to our machine - I have added text to the Memphis center image to indicate the two locations.


Here is the vector intensity data from our machine - X axis is in seconds.

Here is a close up view of the seismic noise during the 500 seconds before the main tremor.

Here is the apparent location data, in radians, including the tremor itself  - it starts at 500 on the X axis. Positive values are westerly, consistent with the Northwest location of the quake from our machine. Because of the processing limitations of the Arduino Yun, the location calculations are less sensitive to tremors arriving from the North and South.


Here  is the log scale of the combined probability data, without averaging.  The combined probability is the product of the probability of the location data and the vector magnitude data. There are definite statistical aberrations noted in the minutes preceding the main event. The lowest probability point in the precursor data is in the one-in-a-billion range! Because of the size of the initial data set after start up, the minimum possible combined log probability is -10.3. This explains the bottoming out of the data during the actual earthquake. 


Here is the same data, with running averaging.


Once again, VERY interesting data. We need to profile dozens of tremors before any conclusions can be drawn about the statistical prediction of local earthquakes, but this is another confirmatory event that seems to say we are on the right track! The placement of a machine to the west of Yellowstone park will happen sometime in late fall if everything goes well.

Discussions