The upgraded National Earthquake Alerts Centre at Geoscience Australia. Image provided by GA.
Geoscience Australia’s National Earthquake Alerts Centre has been officially reopened following a major upgrade, including the move to a commercial cloud-based service as its core infrastructure platform.
It is the first earthquake monitoring facility in the world to have made such a move, according to Geoscience Australia’s Acting Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Andy Barnicoat.
“Although it looks fantastic, the improvements we’ve made to the Centre aren’t just superficial,” he said at the facility’s reopening with Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Matt Canavan.
“Using the cloud has improved the website’s capacity and flexibility to handle the spikes in demand commonly experienced immediately after a significant earthquake in Australia.”
“Moving to the cloud gave us the opportunity to upgrade the Centre’s detection, analysis and alerting system and modernise Geoscience Australia’s earthquakes website earthquakes.ga.gov.au. “Given that on average, we detect and locate 750 Australian earthquakes each year, it’s not surprising the earthquakes website is one of Geoscience Australia’s most visited,” Dr. Barnicoat said.
Other improvements to the centre’s services include an expansion of the ‘felt earthquake’ reporting functionality for mobile users, with those reporting seismic activity now able to whether someone else in your area or elsewhere has also submitted a felt report.
Since 2008, Geoscience Australia has published information on approximately 15,000 earthquakes from around the world. On average, this works out to be about 1,500 per year, of which 100 are Australian earthquakes of magnitude 3.0, or larger.
