cquara---coastal-quake-alert-response-and-analytics

This project is a design solution to alert members in a remote coastal community of an earthquake that has occurred in its broad vicinity, so they may spread the word and prepare to take precautions against a probable Tsunami. Further, we explore techniques to find patterns from mini-quakes occurring in the recent past to reasonably predict a major occurrence. Our solution is tailored keeping in mind communities that experience no or intermittent connectivity to the Internet or GSM networks.

Description

Alerting community members living in remote coastal communities of an earthquake related Tsunami is often challenging. Let us take the example of Andaman and Nicobar islands, located in the Indian Ocean. Most parts of the island do not have internet connectivity or GSM coverage with only certain establishments in the land with access to a low bandwidth internet connection. Such regions however have a rich penetration of Cable TV and FM radio culture. This is just on of many inhabited islands that are remote.

In our solution, we have a node that maybe solar powered, running on an open hardware Linux board connected to the internet, constantly receiving updates from the USGS earthquake feed every 5 minutes. We extract the magnitude and location of earthquakes that have just occurred, and see if it lies within a critical distance/radius off-coast from the node's current location. If so, an alert is sent out as an audio message over a radio frequency as a Voice alert or AFSK data, depending on the design of the civic media paradigm.

NOTE : Using a community FM frequency will require permission from your respective governments and a policy recommendation could be made for the free and fair use of Spectrum for Disaster Management. Alternatively, a licensed HAM radio operator with due support and clearance may use designated frequencies to reach out to the coastal community in event of a quake alert.

This project was initiated by: Sharath Chandra Ram , Faculty at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology / Researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society and Suraj Kumar Jana , Founder and CEO of OpenCube and student at BMSIT.

Project Information

License: Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0)


Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/cquara/

Resources

USGS Earthquake Data - http://earthquake.usgs.gov/