Earthquake Early Warning - Blog

It has been an exciting week for the EEW team as we took receipt of the first shipment of Titan SMA instruments. These strong motion accelerographs will help monitor Canada’s at-risk regions for the strong shaking associated with potentially harmful earthquakes. For Calvin, one of the field technologists who unpacked the devices, it was as though his birthday had come early.

NRCan recently collected vibration data near Highway 417 in eastern Ontario, in anticipation of installing Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) sensors at inspection stations, scales, and cameras operated by Provincial Ministries of Transportation. The Ministry of Transportation sites are attractive for EEW stations because they are easy to access and have permanent power and communications systems. Traffic causes vibrations the ground, however, and this can mask the seismic signals of earthquakes. NRCan Systems Specialist Reid (and his trusty dog) installed six temporary seismo-acoustic stations in a line at 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, and 640 metres from the edge of the highway for one week. Data are now being analyzed to understand levels of background noise generated by highway traffic.

Results will be posted here soon.

We are pleased to announce the first contract to provide seismic sensors and installation services for the Earthquake Early Warning system has been issued to Nanometrics. We will be acquiring the Titan strong motion accelerograph. This device will record ground motions from potentially harmful earthquakes and transmit this data to our processing centres, from where EEW alerts will be disseminated.

A further contract for the remainder of the sensors will be signed soon.