The U.S. Geological Survey is crowdsourcing natural disasters. When an earthquake or flood occurs in the United States or even around the world, the agency is asking the public for feedback and mining the data from social media sites.
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USGS launched the Did You Feel it? Web site in 2007 to gather information from around the world. On Thursday alone, people from around the world reported feeling 31 earthquakes from California to Washington State to Tonga to Indonesia.
"This has turned out to be a very positive and popular feature," Blanpied says. "For this Death Valley earthquake, more than 200 people responded from 88 different zip codes. We have a map up that shows in colors where people reported."
Blanpied says if an earthquake happens in a densely populated area of the world, the Web site can receive 60,000-to-70,000 updates.
USGS also depends on other social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr to understand the impact of the natural disaster and supplement its own network of monitoring devices.
USGS combines what they can find through open source with information from its own network as well.
"Following an earthquake, we receive quite a bit of information from our seismic networks and that lets us make rapid estimates of what the impact could be," Blanpied says. "We have two systems, one calculates the ground shaking around the earthquake and we put that information on a shake map. We then layer on the known population of areas of the earthquake to figure out how many people were shaken and how hard."
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"Our goal is to push information out as rapidly and accurately as possible in a variety of forms that are useful for people who need to make very rapid decisions," he [Blanpied] says. "The more rapidly we can do that the better. Over time we have improved the speed of our seismic networks and the speed of our computers that can process that information."
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