J1 Earthquake Management / J1 Ticker Weather

On February 24, 2021 (JST), the Japan Meterological Agency (JMA) discontinued their former website design, which rendered our earthquake result monitoring from the JMA unoperational.  This also impacted our ability to monitor for tsunami.  It did not directly impact our Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) functionality.

REC has developed new interfaces with the JMA's XML web service.  REC will poll this API once per minute to get information on the last earthquake.  The API also supports obtaining Shindo (intensity) readings at the prefecture, area and community levels.  We will use this functionality to replace our current use of the NHK API to obtain Shindo data at the area level (most prefectures have at least two areas, if not more... such as Fukushima-Hamadori, Fukushima-Nakadori, etc.).

We have updated the earthquake website (https://eew.j1fm.tokyo) to support the new internal format used for earthquake data from all reports received since March 13, 2021.  

JMA final earthquake data is once again being written to Twitter at account @J1_quake. 

Earthquake support has been rewritten for the J1 Ticker.  In addition, we also reinstated the weather functionality in the ticker based on the new OpenWeather architecture. 

We are unable to provide (at this time), historical earthquake data after 9:54AM JST February 24, 2021 and before 12:47PM JST March 13, 2021.  We will try to find a way to recover some or all of that data.  

REC plans to make a complete refurbishment of the Earthquake Early Warning monitor that interfaces with Rivendell radio automation.  A test environment will be set up on our RD4 server that runs Delmarva FM.  Therefore, listeners to the Delmarva FM web stream may occasionally hear a test of the onair EEW system.  Once this system works properly, it will be moved to the RD3 server which runs all three J1 channels and will be deployed in production.  The system on RD4 will remain as a test envionment and will not interrupt for actual earthquake warnings.

REC also plans to build a new tsunami monitoring service using the JMA XML API.   As with EEW, RD4 (Delmarva FM) will be used as the test environment. 

 

Date: 
Saturday, March 20, 2021
Systems affected: 
J1 Earthquake Site
Issue type: 
Enhancement