A Rapid Assessment Method for Seismic Intensity Area and Affecting Field Direction Using Mobile Phone Base Stations

Rapid assessment of disaster information such as seismic intensity area and affecting field direction after an earthquake is important for rescue. However, seismic equipment has limited coverage and need a long time to assess disasters. Compared to seismic equipment, mobile phone base stations have wider coverage, higher density, and faster response to the damage, which can be used to quickly assess earthquake disasters. Existing methods only take damaged base stations into calculation and treat them as identical, but they should have different contributions in different conditions. In our algorithm, both damaged base stations and normal base stations are considered altogether. In order to make full use of the information, we increase the sampling points, reasonably calculate by kernel density method, and propose the concept of “damage ratio” to determine the weight of all points. Finally, the weighted standard deviation ellipse algorithm is used to obtain the seismic intensity area and affecting field direction. This method can be verified to be better than the traditional method through the real earthquake case.