The Red Atrapa Sismos (Quake Catcher Network in Mexico): assessing performance during large and damaging earthquakes.

The Quake‐Catcher Network (QCN) is an expanding seismic array made possible by thousands of participants who volunteered time and resources from their computers to record seismic data using low‐cost accelerometers (http://qcn.stanford.edu/; last accessed December 2014). Sensors based on Micro‐Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology have rapidly improved over the last few years due to the demand of the private sector (e.g., automobiles, cell phones, and laptops). For strong‐motion applications, low‐cost MEMS accelerometers have promising features due to an increasing resolution and near‐linear phase and amplitude response (Cochran, Lawrence, Christensen, and Jakka, 2009; Clayton et al. , 2011; Evans et al. , 2014). Each volunteer computer monitors ground motion and communicates using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, Anderson, 2004). Using a standard short‐term average, long‐term average (STLA) algorithm (Earle and Shearer, 1994; Cochran, Lawrence, Christensen, Chung, 2009; Cochran, Lawrence, Christensen, and Jakka, 2009), volunteer computer and sensor systems detect abrupt changes in the acceleration recordings. Each time a possible trigger signal is declared, a small package of information containing sensor and ground‐motion information is streamed to one of the QCN servers (Chung et al. , 2011). Trigger signals, correlated in space and time, are then processed by the QCN server to look for potential earthquakes. Former studies analyzed the reliability of the recorded ground motions (Cochran et al. , 2011) as well as the speed and accuracy of earthquake magnitude and location determination (Chung et al. , 2011; Lawrence et al. , 2014) from QCN records. In Chile, ∼100 sensors were installed after the 27 February 2010 M w 8.8 earthquake to monitor its aftershocks (Chung et al. , 2011). Trigger analysis found that sensor triggers were transferred from Chile to the QCN server in California, with an average latency of ∼5 s. More than 90% of the triggers arrived in …