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How to make headlines with citizen seismology

Paul Denton • 28 April 2022
headlines
Raspberryshake citizen seismology stations in Europe

Big headlines for small earthquake

On 8th August 2019 a small earthquake happened in Cornwall, UK. Despite being less than magnitude 3 it caused great excitement locally, and even nationally.
At the time this earthquake happened the deep geothermal energy company United Downs had just set up a network of low cost raspberryshake seismometers in local schools as part of their community outreach programme.   

These simple, low cost seismometers easily detected the signal from this earthquake right across the county. Data from these sensors can be downloaded from an online archive using simple Python programs and using the ObsPy Python library

from obspy.clients.fdsn import Client
from obspy import UTCDateTime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# station names
seislist=['RB30C','RB5E8','RD93E','R82BD','R7FA5']
# set the data window
starttime=UTCDateTime("2019-08-08 16:52:05.10")
# read in list of Raspberry Shakes by looping through the list from the second seismometer
client=Client(base_url='https://fdsnws.raspberryshakedata.com/')
waveform=client.get_waveforms('AM',seislist[0],'00','EHZ',starttime,starttime+15)
for x in range (1,len(seislist)):
    waveform+=client.get_waveforms('AM',seislist[x],'00','EHZ',starttime,starttime+15)
waveform.detrend(type='demean')
waveform.plot(size=(1024,800),type='normal', method='full',equal_scale=False, starttime=starttime)

See www.dentonseismo.co.uk for more details of educational and citizen seismology and resources 
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