Overview#
A magnitude 5.8 earthquake strikes 40 km offshore at 03:47. Within seconds, the Natural Hazards domain detects the USGS feed update, scores the event's significance, issues alerts to populations in the affected zone, creates a dynamic geofence around the impact area, and generates AI-powered prepositioning recommendations for response teams, all before most residents have checked their phones.
Key Features#
- Real-time USGS earthquake feed integration with automatic polling
- Tsunami warning detection and elevated alert handling
- Significance scoring for event prioritisation
- Community felt report tracking for ground-truth validation
- Automated alert generation for earthquakes at or above magnitude 4.0
- Dynamic geofence creation based on earthquake magnitude and location
- AI-powered resource prepositioning recommendations for aftershock preparedness
- Mass notification campaigns for significant seismic events
- Configurable geographic coverage and magnitude thresholds per organisation
- Magnitude-based action tiers from storage-only through critical alert
Use Cases#
Relevant sectors include critical infrastructure, national emergency management, and public safety agencies.
- Monitoring seismic activity in real time and automatically alerting affected populations
- Generating resource prepositioning recommendations for disaster response teams
- Creating dynamic geofences around earthquake-affected areas for targeted notifications
- Tracking earthquake history and community felt reports for situational awareness
Integration#
The Natural Hazards domain integrates with Geofence for dynamic hazard zone creation, Notification for mass alerting campaigns, Social Media for synthetic post generation, and Alert for automatic alert creation based on earthquake magnitude thresholds.
Open Standards#
- FDSN Web Services (fdsnws): The domain queries the USGS earthquake catalogue via the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks fdsnws/event/1 standard interface for historical and real-time seismic event retrieval.
- GeoJSON (RFC 7946): USGS real-time feeds are consumed as GeoJSON FeatureCollections, and all dynamically generated hazard geofences are stored and exchanged in GeoJSON Feature format.
- WGS 84 (EPSG:4326): All earthquake epicentre and geofence coordinates use the World Geodetic System 1984 datum as latitude/longitude decimal degrees.
- Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) and Community Decimal Intensity (CDI): Shaking-intensity values from the USGS are ingested and stored to support ground-truth validation and significance scoring of seismic events.
- ISO 8601: All event timestamps, recommendation validity windows, and API responses serialise datetimes in ISO 8601 format with UTC timezone offsets.
- GraphQL: The domain exposes its full query and mutation surface through a typed GraphQL API, enabling clients to retrieve earthquake events, monitoring statistics, and prepositioning recommendations.
- OAuth 2.0 / JWT (RFC 7519): Access to all GraphQL operations is gated by RS256-signed JSON Web Tokens verified against a JWKS endpoint, following OAuth 2.0 bearer token conventions.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14