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USGC leveraging Twitter to anticipate earthquakes

NextGov: “According to a Twitter blog post on Wednesday, the USGS has begun to augment its seismological data with a real-time feed of tweets. The social-network data helps fill in holes in the agency’s sensor network and check for false alarms. (The seismic network senses as many as 70 earthquakes per day, but many of them are not felt by anyone at ground-level.) Twitter confirmation of an earthquake can often come very fast, especially in technology-dense areas. When a magnitude-6.0 quake hit Napa, California, in August 2014, the USGS’s scripts confirmed the quake was real less than 90 seconds after it began. It of course helps that Twitter use is common in northern California—but then again, so are earthquakes…”

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