‘Majority Rules’ When Looking for Earthquakes, Explosions
Sandia National LaboratoriesA dormant volcano in Antarctica helped researchers at Sandia National Laboratories improve sensor data readings to better detect earthquakes and explosions and tune out everyday sounds such as traffic and footsteps. Finding the ideal settings for each sensor in a network to detect vibrations in the ground, or seismic activity, can be a painstaking and manual process. Researchers at Sandia are working to change that by using software that automatically adjusts the seismic activity detection levels for each sensor. Sandia tested the new software with seismic data from the Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica and achieved 18 percent fewer false detections and 11 percent fewer missed detections than the original performance of the sensors on Mt. Erebus.