USGS mobilizes Web 2.0 to better understand natural disasters

The U.S. Geological Survey is crowdsourcing natural disasters.

When an earthquake or flood occurs in the United States or even around the world, the agency is asking the public for feedback and mining the data from social media sites.

"[Thursday] morning's earthquake in Death Valley, Calif., was a magnitude five and within 3-or-4 minutes we had pushed information to our Web site," says Mike Blanpied, the associate coordinator of the USGS's earthquake hazards program. "Almost immediately we received responses from people who felt the earthquake. Anyone who feels it can fill out a short form and send the information back and we put it up on a map."

USGS launched the Did You Feel it? Web site in 2007 to gather information from around the world. On Thursday alone, people from around the world reported feeling 31 earthquakes from California to Washington State to Tonga to Indonesia.

"This has turned out to be a very positive and popular feature," Blanpied says. "For this Death Valley earthquake, more than 200 people responded from 88 different zip codes. We have a map up that shows in colors where people reported."

Blanpied says if an earthquake happens in a densely populated area of the world, the Web site can receive 60,000-to-70,000 updates.

USGS also depends on other social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr to understand the impact of the natural disaster and supplement its own network of monitoring devices.

Blanpied says during the disastrous 2007 earthquake in China some of the best information scientists received came from the Internet where people posted videos and pictures.

"Through those YouTube videos and other things, scientists at USGS and elsewhere were able to mine information to come up with much better idea of what happened," he says. "Scientists could figure out where the fault had broken, where it was we might have problems of landslides or damned rivers. Scientists put together a rapid picture of the earthquake."

USGS combines what they can find through open source with information from its own network as well.

"Following an earthquake, we receive quite a bit of information from our seismic networks and that lets us make rapid estimates of what the impact could be," Blanpied says. "We have two systems, one calculates the ground shaking around the earthquake and we put that information on a shake map. We then layer on the known population of areas of the earthquake to figure out how many people were shaken and how hard."

Blanpied says USGS has another system call Pager that helps scientists decide how big the earthquake or other natural disaster is.

"It helps us understand what response may be needed and where the damage likely is to be distributed," he says. "But this information is only as good as what comes in. As with Did You Feel It?, people on the ground who experienced the earthquake or other natural disaster helps complete the picture."

USGS also shares information with other federal agencies, most importantly the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about earthquakes that could cause possible tsunamis.

Blanpied says USGS sends seismic information to NOAA so they can predict and issue warnings about possible tidal waves.

"Our goal is to push information out as rapidly and accurately as possible in a variety of forms that are useful for people who need to make very rapid decisions," he says. "The more rapidly we can do that the better. Over time we have improved the speed of our seismic networks and the speed of our computers that can process that information."

Blanpied says USGS has increased the density and quality of the seismic meters, especially in dense urban areas at risk. The agency is constructing the Advanced National Seismic system, which lets them put out information more quickly.

USGS is considering implementing an early warning system to receive information even more quickly, and possibly warn people before the earthquake reaches the earth's surface.

"This earthquake early warning system is operating in Japan and other areas," he says. "We are studying how to bring that to the U.S."

USGS also received about $140 million from the Recovery Act and some of that the agency is using to improve seismic meters in the ground that could be used in the early warning system.

"The technology is with us so it's a question of deciding to do it," he says.

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On the Web:

USGS -Did You Feel It? Web site

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