lindol: An Interface to the PHIVOLCS Earthquake Bulletins

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) maintains the National Earthquake Monitoring and Information which aims to provide accurate and timely information on significant earthquakes and tsunami events that may significantly impact the Philippines and ensures the accessibility and integrity of earthquake data.

This package provides an interface to this information with functions that harvest, process, and structure information from the frequent earthquake bulletins released by PHIVOLCS into machine-readable versions.

The package name lindol (pronounced /linˈdol/ [lɪn̪ˈd̪ol]) is the Tagalog word for earthquake.

What does lindol do?

The lindol package provides functions that harvest, process, and structure information from the PHIVOLCS earthquake bulletins. Currently, lindol has functions for:

1. Building URLs for archived and current webpages that contain real-time earthquake information;

2. Extracting tabular data from webpages containing real-time earthquake information; and,

3. Processing tabular data from webpages containing real-time earthquake information.

Installation

lindol is not yet on CRAN but can be installed through the panukatan R Universe with:

install.packages(
  "lindol",
  repos = c("https://panukatan.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org")
)

Usage

The main usage of lindol is to retrieve earthquake monitoring data from PHIVOLCS’s earthquake bulletins. The main function is eq_data() and can be used as follows:

## Load the package ----
library(lindol)

## Get the current year and current month data ----
eq_data()

which provides a tibble output as follows:

#> # A tibble: 1,247 × 7
#>    date_time_retrieved date_time           latitude longitude depth magnitude
#>    <dttm>              <dttm>                 <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>     <dbl>
#>  1 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 13:25:00     7.83      127.    27       2.4
#>  2 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 12:28:00     6.38      124.    19       2.2
#>  3 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 10:40:00    12.8       125.    19       2.6
#>  4 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 10:31:00    10.0       126.    88       4.1
#>  5 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 10:09:00     8.67      126.    30       2.3
#>  6 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 09:53:00    15.0       120.    10       3  
#>  7 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 09:02:00    19.6       121.     1       2.9
#>  8 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 08:20:00    13.2       120.    27       3.7
#>  9 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 07:48:00    12.2       125.    44       1.7
#> 10 2024-08-16 06:53:56 2024-08-16 07:32:00    14.0       120.    22       2.2
#> # ℹ 1,237 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: location <chr>

The output has 7 fields:

• date_time_retrieved - Date and time (of type POSIXct/POSIXt) the data has been retrieved from the PHIVOLCS earthquake monitoring bulletins. This is basically a time stamp on when the user made a call to eq_data();

• date_time - Date and time (of type POSIXct/POSIXt) the specific earthquake was detected and recorded. This is recorded in Philippine Standard Time (PST);

• longitude - Longitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;

• latitude - Latitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;

• depth - Depth (in kilometres units) of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;

• magnitude - Magnitude of the earthquake; and,

• location - Location of the earthquake in relation to a monitoring station.

The default implementation of the eq_data() function outputs earthquake monitoring data for the current month of the current year. If data for a specific year is needed, say for example for year 2020, then:

## Retrieve data for all months of year 2020 ----
eq_data(.year = 2020)

which gives:

#> # A tibble: 14,047 × 7
#>    date_time_retrieved date_time           latitude longitude depth magnitude
#>    <dttm>              <dttm>                 <dbl>     <dbl> <dbl>     <dbl>
#>  1 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 23:50:00     6.56      125.    12       2.2
#>  2 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 23:46:00     6.58      125.     9       2.1
#>  3 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 23:02:00     8.59      127.    13       3.2
#>  4 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 22:34:00     6.62      125.    13       3.6
#>  5 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 21:18:00     6.57      125.    16       2.8
#>  6 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 21:17:00    10.2       126.    18       2.9
#>  7 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 19:35:00     6.58      125.    17       3.1
#>  8 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 19:18:00     6.59      125.    13       4.9
#>  9 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 17:46:00    10.5       126.     3       3.5
#> 10 2024-08-16 06:53:57 2020-01-31 15:42:00     5.22      126.    37       3.1
#> # ℹ 14,037 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: location <chr>

Citation

If you find the lindol package useful please cite using the suggested citation provided by a call to the citation() function as follows:

citation("lindol")
#> To cite lindol in publications use:
#> 
#>   Ernest Guevarra (2024). _lindol: An Interface to the PHIVOLCS
#>   Earthquake Bulletins_. R package version 0.0.9000,
#>   <https://panukatan.io/lindol/>.
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Manual{,
#>     title = {lindol: An Interface to the PHIVOLCS Earthquake Bulletins},
#>     author = {{Ernest Guevarra}},
#>     year = {2024},
#>     note = {R package version 0.0.9000},
#>     url = {https://panukatan.io/lindol/},
#>   }

Community guidelines

Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are welcome; file issues or seek support here. If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our contributing guidelines.

This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.