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Earthquakes

Collection of earthquake data and related analysis

Source: USGS (for now)

As of 22-Aug-2015, scraper.py gets data only from USGS. This is already bunched-together and available in earthquakes_data_USGS.7z for 1900 to Aug 2015 and you don't need to run the scraper.

But, in the unlikely case that you have to, the section how to run scraper will help.

Column names and meaning

Source - http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/glossary.php

time - Time when the event occurred. Times are reported in milliseconds since the epoch ( 1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z), and do not include leap seconds. In certain output formats, the date is formatted for readability.

latitude - Decimal degrees latitude. Negative values for southern latitudes

longitude - Decimal degrees longitude. Negative values for western longitudes.

depth - Depth of the event in kilometers.

mag - magnitude of earthquake

magType - The method or algorithm used to calculate the preferred magnitude for the event.

nst - The total number of Number of seismic stations which reported P- and S-arrival times for this earthquake.

gap - gap between azimuthally adjacent stations (in degrees). In general, the smaller this number, the more reliable is the calculated horizontal position of the earthquake.

dmin - Horizontal distance from the epicenter to the nearest station (in degrees). 1 degree is approximately 111.2 kilometers. In general, the smaller this number, the more reliable is the calculated depth of the earthquake.

rms - This parameter provides a measure of the fit of the observed arrival times to the predicted arrival times for this location. Smaller numbers reflect a better fit of the data.

net - Identifies the network considered to be the preferred source of information for this event.

id - A code consisting of source, type, code, updateTime. Eg: us20002wt7

updated - Time when the event was most recently updated.

place - Textual description of named geographic region near to the event

type - Type of seismic event

How to run scraper

There are two user inputs required:

  1. Start date - from which you want to collect earthquake events At the time of writing, USGS has data from the year 1900 so you can provide
    "1900-01-01" (without quotes) to start from the beginning
    OR specify date yourself in YYYY-MM-DD format
    OR let the script start from the last event in your data by hitting Enter key.

  2. How many years of data do you need ? Just type a number. No input will default to 1 year.

When you run the script you should see an output like this -

> python scraper.py
We need a start date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
If you want to continue from last date in the data, just hit Enter:
Get data for how many years ?

P.S: If you see an error like below, please set DAYS parameter to 30 or 60 or 90 or even 180.:

Please set DAYS parameter in the script to a lower number.
USGS does not return more than 20 thousand events per request.