Geoscience Australia’s upgraded National Earthquake Alerts Centre has been officially reopened.
After performing the ceremony, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Matt Canavan was given a tour of the facility by Acting Chief Executive of Geoscience Australia, Andy Barnicoat.
Dr Barnicoat said the opening was the end result of months of hard work, which not only included a refresh of the Centre’s facilities but a number of other improvements.
“Although it looks fantastic, the improvements we’ve made to the Centre aren’t just superficial,” Dr Barnicoat said.
“We recently became the first earthquake monitoring facility in the world to use commercial cloud computing as its primary infrastructure platform,” he said.
“Moving to the cloud gave us the opportunity to upgrade the Centre’s detection, analysis and alerting system and modernise Geoscience Australia’s earthquakes website.”
He said given that, on average, the Agency detected and located 750 Australian earthquakes each year, it was not surprising the earthquakes website was one of Geoscience Australia’s most visited.
“Using the cloud has improved the website’s capacity and flexibility to handle the spikes in demand commonly experienced immediately after a significant earthquake in Australia,” Dr Barnicoat said.
He said it was now easier than ever before for users of mobile devices to view, search and report earthquakes in Australia.
“Although anyone who’s experienced an earthquake has been able to submit a felt report online for about a decade, using the new interactive felt report feature, you will be able to see whether someone else in your area or elsewhere has also submitted a felt report,” Dr Barnicoat said.
