A research project co-funded by New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission (EQC) into an experimental earthquake warning system using low-cost sensors has been granted funding to install 20 seismometers across the lower North Island.

Last year, a small number of seismometers were installed in Wellington and the Wairarapa area which provided scientists with an opportunity to develop effective new earthquake early warning architecture, and analyse and validate its performance.

Initial findings have been published in the Informatics Swiss-based open access journal in an article titled “Saving Precious Seconds: A Novel Approach to Implementing a Low-Cost Earthquake Early Warning System with Node-Level Detection and Alert Generation”.

The team, led by researcher Raj Prasanna from the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University, worked with local communities using low-cost seismometers to identify appropriate locations to test the sensor network architecture.

EQC says the low-cost earthquake warning project has gained significant momentum and finds clusters of low-cost seismometers can issue earthquake early warnings at a local level.

“Developing a simple but robust network of sensors where all the detection algorithms are working at the sensor-node itself is a big step forward in helping us towards developing innovative early warning systems,” Dr Prasanna said, adding the team are providing open access to all source codes to advance the project.

“This project has become much bigger than we originally anticipated and it has created several other aligned projects, including school outreach and internships,” he said.