Post date: Aug 25, 2014 2:20:04 PM

In California, the San Francisco Bay Area has been rocked by its strongest earthquake in 25 years. The 6.1-magnitude quake hit just south of Napa in wine country early Sunday, destroying homes, bursting water mains and gas lines and sending wine bottles hurtling to the ground. More than 120 people were injured. Economic losses could total $1 billion.

The USArray Ground Motion Visualization

Summary

Visualizations of real data showing how seismic waves sweep across the USArray network of seismic stations. Watch how seismic waves from earthquakes in the US and around the world cause the ground to move at each seismometer.

Click here to see seismic waves traveling from the epicenter of the Magnitude 6.1 Earthquake that hit Northern California early (3:20 am local time) Sunday morning August 24, 2014

The USArray Ground Motion Visualization (GMV) is a video-based IRIS DMS product that illustrates how seismic waves travel away from an earthquake location by depicting the normalized recorded wave amplitudes at each seismometer location using colored symbols (see maps below). The color of each symbol depicts the amplitude of the vertical ground motion, as detected by the station’s seismometer

(for TA stations this represents velocity of ground movement) and normalized to its peak amplitude. The color changes as waves of differing amplitude travel past the seismometer. Blue indicates downward ground motion while red represents upward ground motion with the darker colors indicating larger amplitudes.