USGS rolls out new update to ShakeAlert app to detect earthquakes earlier NBC Los Angeles [Video]

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced a new update to its earthquake alert app that aims to give advance notice seconds before some of the strongest earthquakes hit.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Detection system can detect earthquakes of all sizes, but this update allows the agency to determine the size of the biggest earthquakes faster, so alerts can be sent to people’s phones quicker.

“Seismic stations tell us how fast the ground is moving and these other stations tell us how far it’s moving and by looking at both of them together, we can get a better sense of how those big earthquakes are going to impact a region,” said Robert de Groot, operations team lead for ShakeAlert. “So we have seismometers that pick up the ground motion, we move that information to a processing center in a fraction of a second, we process it, and then we start …