Quakefinder Blog

We are very pleased to announce a new member of the QuakeFinder team. Laura MacLean served as an intern to QuakeFinder this summer and has agreed to join the project full-time. Laura is a recent graduate with a Master of Science Degree in Geophysics from the Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley and also holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from UC San Diego’s School of Earth Science. After beginning her internship in June, Laura was of instant value to QuakeFinder’s research efforts by developing custom visualization software for our time-series data. This tool enables our team to review our dense data sets from multiple QF stations and mark intervals of interest for further evaluation. In addition to her focused support of QuakeFinder’s ‘Path To Stats’ (our initiative to develop correlation statistics on our largest earthquake data set), Laura was tasked with the evaluation of the an ‘Artificial-Intelligence-In-A-Box’ software package built by a local startup. The entire QF team is excited that Laura is joining and we look forward to working with her to create an earthquake forecasting system – and save lives.
Welcome Laura!

Book Review: The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought To See the Future
Author: Peter Moore, 2015
Review by: Dan Coughlin, Director, QuakeFinder

The subject book provides a detailed history of the emergence of weather forecasting as it advanced in the U.K. and U.S. during the mid 19th century.  The author focuses on a handful of scientists, sailors, inventors, explorers and others that broke with the conventional wisdom and beliefs in meteorology to better understand the content and behavior of the atmosphere and to attempt to put order to what appeared to be random weather.

Read more

QuakeFinder would like to thank The Costanoa Lodge in Pescadero, California for hosting a QF station on the property. This Spring, QuakeFinder’s nearby Ano Nuevo station suffered communication loss due to a local AT&T cell tower deactivation. This remote (and beautiful) coastal area has been challenging in the past to maintain a sufficient cell phone signal strength for our daily data transmission. Costanoa kindly agreed to let QuakeFinder move the Ano Nuevo site to their property.

During our installation at the Costanoa Lodge, QuakeFinder personnel had the opportunity to tour the grounds and meet the staff. The Lodge is a phenomenal camping destination complete with cabins, bungalows, RV spaces, a spa, lodge, meeting rooms and a restaurant/bar. We highly recommend The Costanoa Lodge for your next camping trip or corporate event. Visit http://www.costanoa.com.

A special ‘thanks’ to Trevor Bridge, the general manager, and his maintenance team for the assistance during the QF station relocation. Welcome to the QuakeFinder Community!

The QuakeFinder team would like to thank Henry Dela Pena for his dedicated service to the project.

Henry is our ‘Operations Fellow’ in Southern California and supports the team in maintaining and upgrading our stations and sensors. As of August 25th, he completed his portion of QuakeFinder’s ‘California 2016 Sweep’ – wherein we are visiting every one of our 125 stations in California to perform annual maintenance. Site visits this year also included some key hardware/software upgrades that are making our system even more robust.

Henry’s region is especially challenging as it covers the Mojave desert and other difficult-to-reach and remote sites. He performed his tasks diligently and on schedule completing the sweep of 38 sites – each taking many hours to complete in challenging environments. The QuakeFinder data streams from his region are continuing to flow from those sites flawlessly.

Thank you Henry!