Build an Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system and visualize historical seismic data sets

Archived content

Archive date: 2024-06-07

This content is no longer being updated or maintained. The content is provided “as is.” Given the rapid evolution of technology, some content, steps, or illustrations may have changed.

Use the example Node-RED flows and dashboards to build an Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system. After completing this tutorial, you will be ready to modify these example flows and dashboards to create your own EEW and data visualization solution.

The Node-RED flows in this tutorial observe the real-time OpenEEW accelerometer sensor data and calculate if the sensor might be experiencing seismic activity using an algorithm for vibration data.

The following animated gif shows the dashboard created from Example 3: animated gif of Node-RED dashboards

Learning objectives

In this tutorial, you will:

Install Node-RED and the prerequisites required to build the dashboards
Learn how to program an algorithm to detect seismic shaking
Build a dashboard that displays live Earthquake Early Warning Sensor Alerts on a map and sends a SMS warning if a possible earthquake is detected.
Build a dashboard that plots real-time seismic activity sensor graphs in a chart by subscribing to a MQTT broker.
Build a dashboard that plots the historical seismic activity from an OpenEEW dataset.

Prerequisites

Node-RED Essentials

Use the videos in this playlist to help you learn the basics of building Node-RED flows.

Install Node-RED locally on your system
Add the following nodes to your Node-RED palette.

Estimated time

Completing this tutorial should take about 30 minutes.

Steps

The example flows are provided in the flows folder of the openeew-nodered project.

Example 1: Build a flow that displays sensor alerts on a map
Example 2: Build a flow that plots near real-time seismic activity sensor graphs in a chart
Example 3: Plot the historic seismic activity from an OpenEEW dataset

Example 1: Build a flow that displays sensor alerts on a map

This flow plots the OpenEEW sensors on a map of Mexico and displays their seismic activity status.

Node-RED flow that displays sensor alerts on a map

Get the code

Example 2: Build a flow that plots near real-time seismic activity sensor graphs in a chart

This flow subscribes to the live data feed (which is available via MQTT) of a selected sensor, and then plots the seismic activity in a set of graphs.

Node-RED flow that plots near real-time seismic activity in a chart

Get the code

Example 3: Plot the historic seismic activity from an OpenEEW dataset

This flow displays a Node-RED dashboard that allows an investigator to select an interesting sensor and time period to study and then queries the OpenEEW dataset. The flow then plots the historical sensor data in a set of graphs.

Node-RED flow that plots historic seismic activity from an OpenEEW dataset

This flow has six sections:

Select a historical date
Build and display an OpenEEQ dataset
Select a sensor
Cycle through a time series of adjacent datasets
Plot seismic graphs
Download historical sensor data

Get the code

Summary and next steps

The openeew-nodered project is just one of the many OpenEEW projects that you can contribute to. Engage with the open source community and build solutions to address issues we all are facing today. Join the Call for Code challenge and contribute to these open source projects that are supported by the Linux Foundation.