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Tübitak Earthquake Prediction Project
“Eclipse – Seismic Risk Modelling System”
Homeros narrates the rage of earthquake god –Poseidon- on this territory in his Odysseia; that he was agitating the seas
and shaking the earth. Poseidon was angry at Odysseia and this rage never ceased for centuries. It was this rage that
had devastated Troy, Ephesus, Pergamon and shattering the center of the globe.
What was held for Poseidon’s rage in the ancient Greek mythology, is indeed the earth crust deforming causing the
earthquakes, the flux of civilizations and the geography reformation.
Tübitak Marmara Research Center began to work on enhancing forecasting techniques, after the earthquake of
17th August 1999 that hit Ýstanbul, Ýzmit, Adapazarý.
They attempted to remotely observe seismic activity with GPS devices, radio modems and GSM data connections. However
the devices were outdated. Radio modems in stations were consuming too much energy and the vast
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energy demand was an
obstacle to the usage of cheap energy options like solar energy. This construct limiting the usage of the system only
within the boundaries of Gebze and Trakya was having communication failures. The low bandwidth of GSM data connection
with 9600 and 14400 baud data transfer speed led to high communication costs and hence to high system utilisation costs.When the problem in data transfer through radio modems and GSM is taken into account, it has been established that
the ideal solution would be transparent communication over GPRS. On this occasion, an effort to apply transparent
GPRS modems has been taken. The applications in Tubitak’s research center could then directly communicate to the GPS
devices. Yet this could not be a success due to the issues of the protocols of GPS devices and the applications in
the center. The culprit was that the protocols and the applications at the center were not designed for this process.
At this point, Eclipse developed EDGE telemetry devices with applications having specific features to remotely monitor the
four distinct devices that Tübitak is using for seismic activity research.
These telemetry terminals read the measurement devices on their own, store the data temporarily in their flash memory and
ftp the data to servers in Tübitak’s research center.
During the development phase, major effort was put on reading GPS devices. Without any documentation on the protocol specifications
of the GPS devices, Eclipse decoded these protocols as a result of a 6 months effort and developed all the required functions.
Another feature of the telemetry devices is enabling transparent connection to all the measurement devices. Thanks to
this capability, Tübitak can connect to the devices also with their own applications, montior and configure them.
The system brought out following advantages to Tübitak:
- Thanks to EDGE, enabling packet mode data transfer and wide bandwidth, it decreased
energy consumption, energy and communication costs.
- Smooth automatic data transfer to research center provided time gain, enabling
the researchers to focus on their research instead of wasting time on collecting the data.
- As the system can work on the available devices, it saved Tübitak from an extra
investment in new devices otherwise.
- The fact that the fault data is transferred real-time to the center without any latencies
speeded up the process to predict the next rupture point. This removed the need to collect
memory cards from distant sites which can be as late as weeks and months after seismic
activities. Hence it prevents delays and provides momentary information.
- All the telemetry softwares can be updated on-line remotely and Tübitak’s new functional
requirements can be added to the system later.
- Theres is no need to travel through the individual research sites across Turkey.
This provides gain in time and financial savings.
- Smooth periodic remote data collection opened the way to use devices with less memory for remote measurement.
- The infrastructure developed by Eclipse, has turned the data collection for seismic risk
modelling into a laboratory experiment within the boundaries of the campus and has been a major
enhancement step towards predicting earthquakes.
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