Who publishes SeismoWatch

Publisher

SeismoWatch is written, built and operated by G. Schad.

SeismoWatch is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of the U.S. Geological Survey, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, FUNVISIS or any other seismological agency. Their data is used under the terms each agency publishes, and every page credits its sources.

What this site does

SeismoWatch republishes public earthquake catalogs as pages people can actually read: a live worldwide map, a page for each monitored region, and a permanent page for every earthquake it covers — with the depth, felt reports, nearby towns and local seismic history that a raw catalog entry leaves out.

The Android app is the same service in push form: you draw an area on a map, set a minimum magnitude, and the service notifies your phone when a matching earthquake is published.

This is not an earthquake early-warning system. Every alert here is sent after a seismological agency has detected, located and published an earthquake — typically minutes afterwards. Early warning, which can give seconds of notice before shaking arrives, is a different kind of system operated by national agencies. The difference is explained here, and it matters: nothing on this site should be relied on as an emergency warning service.

Where the data comes from

• USGS — the U.S. Geological Survey global catalog, through its public FDSN and GeoJSON feeds. The only source of felt reports, community intensity, PAGER impact levels and significance scores.
• EMSC — the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, used for regions where the global catalog carries only the largest events. Around Granada it records roughly 200 events a month where the global catalog records about five.
• FUNVISIS — Venezuela's national seismological agency, used by the alert service for small local events.
• GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) — populated places, population figures and the time zone of each epicentre. Used when pages are built, never served to your browser.

Where two catalogs record the same earthquake, the duplicate is removed by matching events within 90 seconds and 100 km of each other. Catalog solutions are preliminary: magnitude, depth and location are revised as more station data arrives, sometimes for weeks. Pages are rebuilt every 30 minutes, so those revisions reach the site without anyone editing anything.

How the guides are written

The explanatory guides state what the agencies state, link the primary source for every claim, and say plainly where the science has no answer — earthquake prediction being the clearest case. When a guide describes what SeismoWatch itself does, it describes what the software actually does, not what would be nice to promise. Corrections are made in place, and the page's update date changes with them.

Contact

Corrections, data questions and reports of something wrong on a page are welcome by post at the address above. The service's live health endpoint is at api.seismowatch.com/healthz.