Japanese mobile users to get advance quake warnings
Another post in the Disaster management technologies series. Japanese mobile telephone users may soon be warned of an earthquake in their area just before it strikes. Japan’s two biggest operators, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have announced that they are jointly developing a system to notify customers of an imminent earthquake. Now the first question I have is: What good will it do? What will YOU do if you find out that a big earthquake is coming in 5 seconds?
And the second question is: How will this work?
The system will pass on information from the Japanese meteorological agency which has developed a way of detecting earthquakes several seconds before the main tremor strikes.
The companies did not say which type of messaging they would use but acknowledged that email — a common way of communicating via cellphone in Japan — would risk overwhelming their mobile networks. SMS is less common in Japan but it is a likely candidate for this kind of alert, I think.
The meteorological agency’s early-warning system detects the first underground tremors that come before the main quake and estimates their intensity before big seismic waves reach the surface.
Japan, which endures 20 percent of the world’s major tremors, prides itself on having one of the world’s most accurate systems for assessing earthquakes and predicting tsunamis.
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