Citizen seismology helps decipher the 2021 Haiti earthquake
E. Calais, Steeve Symithe, Tony Monfret, Bertrand Delouis, Anthony Lomax, Françoise Courboulex, Jean‐Paul Ampuero, Pablo Lara, Quentin Blétery, Jérôme Chèze, Fabrice Peix, A. Deschamps, Bernard de Lépinay, Bryan Raimbault, Romain Jolivet, Sylvert Paul, Sadrac St Fleur, Dominique Boisson, Y. Fukushima, Zacharie Duputel, Liuwei Xu, Lingsen Meng
Abstract
7.0 predecessor, but struck the country when field access was limited by insecurity and conventional seismometers from the national network were inoperative. A network of citizen seismometers installed in 2019 provided near-field data critical to rapidly understand the mechanism of the mainshock and monitor its aftershock sequence. Their real-time data defined two aftershock clusters that coincide with two areas of coseismic slip derived from inversions of conventional seismological and geodetic data. Machine learning applied to data from the citizen seismometer closest to the mainshock allows us to forecast aftershocks as accurately as with the network-derived catalog. This shows the utility of citizen science contributing to our understanding of a major earthquake.