Government launches India Quake app for earthquake parameter dissemination

The Union Ministry of Earth Science has launched India Quake application on the occasion of its foundation day.
The mobile app has been developed by the National Centre for Seismology (NCS) for automatic dissemination of earthquake parameter (location, time and magnitude) after the occurrence of earthquakes

Key Features of India Quake app

The App facilitates information dissemination faster with no restrictions on the number of recipients. It will provide real time earthquake location information on mobile of the user. It also will help in reducing panic amongst people during an earthquake.
The app will notify two categories of events scrutinized and unscrutinized. Unscrutinized earthquake events are those whose parameters have been estimated automatically by the software using the incoming waveform data from remote stations. In the case of scrutinized events category, the unscrutinized will be scrutinized and confirmed by the NCS.

Background

The National Centre for Seismology (NCS) under the Ministry of Earth Science operates national seismological network with 84 stations. These stations are connected to NCS headquarter for real time data communication through VSAT.
In case of an earthquake, NCS locate these stations using data from its network and disseminate earthquake parameters to all concerned government departments and other stake holders through email, SMS and fax.  However this causes some delay in dissemination and also restricts the number of recipients.  India Quake app will overcome this problem.

Month: Current Affairs - July, 2017