Issues

Front: Earthquake early warning (EEW) can give people, as well as mechanical and electrical systems, up to tens of seconds to take protective actions before peak earthquake shaking arrives at a location. Since 2006, the U.S. Geological Survey has been working in collaboration with several partners to develop ShakeAlert, an EEW system for the United States. Kohler et al. (this issue) documents ShakeAlert’s West Coast wide production prototype; Cochran et al. (this issue) presents the prototype’s testing and certification platform. An example of the ShakeAlert user display is shown along with a schematic of the prototype system components.Back: Anderson et al. (this issue) describe “the Gem,” a customized infrasound geophysical logger designed and built to be low-cost, portable, and easy-to-use. They also discuss the various uses they’ve found for it, including projects on volcanoes, in high-altitude balloons, and along rivers. Their bottom line: “[W]e demonstrate that when needed, scientists can feasibly design and build their own specialized instruments, and that doing so can enable them to record more and better data at a lower cost.”