Introduction

Ever since moving to the Bay Area, I've become interested in earthquakes. During my first week working, I felt a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, which was a lot like feeling a big truck rumbling in the parking lot. Not much movement, but enough to rattle a few things on the shelves.

I decided to couple this interest in earthquakes with learning to use Google App Engine, and NVD3 to plot earthquake data. The plot is updated nightly and is shown below.

Implementation

Data is downloaded from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program Live Feed. The GeoJSON is parsed using a Python-based Google App Engine application. A cron job is written to retrieve the USGS data, compute the histogram, and save the resulting statistics nightly.

The plotting application retrieves the saved statistics and uses NVD3 to plot the statistics as a histogram.