"Earthquakes: From Twitter Detection to EO Data Processing" – New joint publication as an outcome of the EOPEN-BETTER synergy

The “H2020 Earth Observation Big Data Hackathon”, co-organised by five now completed EU Horizon 2020 projects in the “EO Big Data Shift” topic, sparked the synergy between EOPEN and BETTER, and in particular between CERTH’s M4D/MKLab, ETH’s Department of Earth Sciences, Elecnor Deimos and Terradue Srl. This successful collaboration was captured with the recent publication of a joint article titled “Earthquakes: From Twitter Detection to EO Data Processing” in IEEE’s Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

The paper presents a pipeline that uses Twitter data to identify locations of earthquakes and uses the information to trigger EO data analysis. The pipeline as well as the use of social media in the population have been tested for almost a year over Japan, an area where earthquake events are frequent. The article shows the results and discusses the potential development of such procedures. In the future, considering the rapid development and the increase of satellite constellations aimed at global coverage with short revisit times, algorithms of this kind could be used to prioritize satellite acquisitions for the detection of the areas most affected by earthquake damages.

Read the full article here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9713961