THE USE OF LOW-COST ACCELEROMETERS IN SEISMOLOGY

Abstract

Data about earthquake parameters is available to different users already in a very short time due to the high-quality national seismic network, which consists of 26 seismic stations. From various professional and technical reasons, this network does not measure the earthquake in the urban environment. However, since these data are important for the reliable identification of seismic hazard and earthquake resistant design of buildings, strong seismic ground oscillations in urban environment are recorded with accelerometers. But the number of those is low. More data about the effects of earthquakes in urban areas could be obtained with a dense network of low-cost accelerometers installed and maintained by using volunteers’ computers located in the urban areas, which are connected to the world Wide Web. At the end of the last decade, the project "Quake-Catcher Network" (QCN) was launched on this topic at Stanford University, which is based on low-cost accelerometers and volunteers’ PCs. The article describes the utility of the system.