Accelerometers for Earthquake Detection

I'm designing and building a weather data collection and logging system for an amateur weather network in California where earthquakes are frequent. It occurred to me that it might be possible to incorporate an IC accelerometer into the hardware design to detect earthquakes.

Do typical integrated accelerometers, such as the Hitachi H48C, have enough sensitivity to detect small to moderate earthquakes? I know that dedicated hardware is required for any serious seismological work, but I'm just looking for the ability to detect that an earthquake occurred and perhaps roughly measure the amplitude of the ground movements.

Has anyone done this type of work with these sensors, or know of any links/sources of info?

Reply to
sodaant
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There is already a distributed computing project to use the accelerometers in laptops to detect earthquakes. Yes it is possible, but results from a single sensor might be hard to disambiguate.

Reply to
larwe

Yes, I do, and I'm sure it would work better, but earthquake sensing is a secondary application here, so I'd rather stick with the accelerometer IC here. The geophone you linked to is also too large to fit in the enclosure I'm using.

Reply to
sodaant

Here's a recent story on it:

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Reply to
Ben Bradley

A contact of mine at ADI told me that their accelerometers were bing used for earthquake detection when I asked him about it.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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