Can thunder be detected with a Citizen seismic station?

 

In this article, we'll explain whether it's possible to detect thunder with a Citizen seismic station and examine the differences in the waves captured between a geophone calibrated to 4.5Hz, a mid-range ADXL355 MEMS accelerometer, and a low-cost GY-521/MPU-6050 MEMS gyroscope accelerometer.

 

Can thunder be detected with a Citizen seismic station?

Can thunder be detected with a Citizen seismic station?
Reading time: 2 minutes

The image accompanying this article is a capture from one of our seismic stations. Specifically, it's station 001, which uses a mid-range ADXL355 MEMS accelerometer as its sensor.

In the green graph in the middle of the screen, you can see a peak. This corresponds to thunder. In this case, you can also see the low-Hz mark it left on the spectrogram. The yellow line just below shows the alarm level for a rapid event, as in this case, which triggered the alarms immediately.

In the graphs on the left, you can also see the mark left by this thunder in the green lines and low-Hz range.

So, we answer, yes, it's possible to detect thunder with a Citizen seismic station, but... if an ADXL355 could detect it, what would a geophone detect? And could a low-end accelerometer also detect it?

To see how far this is possible, we'll choose another day, an episode with a high electrical charge, causing numerous thunderstorms, which will allow us to compare the three sensors.

Next, we'll look at comparative helicorders from three stations, each with three different types of sensors.

Geophone 4.5Hz - 200 V/m/s Mid-range MEMS ADXL355 accelerometer Low-end MEMS accelerometer GY-521/MPU-6050

These graphs show that the event occurred between 8:00 and 9:30 UTC, during which the geophone clearly captured both thunder and torrential rain. The ADXL355 accelerometer did manage to detect some thunderclaps, but they were far less sensitive than the geophone. The GY-521/MPU6050 accelerometer was lucky enough to detect one. It failed to capture any of the others, no matter how loud they were.

Conclusion

A mid-range geophone and accelerometer can both detect thunder, with the geophone being more likely to do so than the accelerometer. A low-cost accelerometer will hardly be able to detect it at all. This is due to the significant background noise it incorporates, and this is the key difference between a low-cost model and a mid-range one, which even then struggles to capture these movements.





Other related blog posts:



Can rain be detected with a Citizen seismic station?

Rain creates small shock waves when it hits the ground, but can these be strong enough to be detected by a Citizen Seismic Station? This article explains it.

Can fireworks be detected with a Citizen seismic station?

We will investigate this using video footage from an ADXL355 accelerometer sensor and seismogram analysis from a geophone calibrated to 4.5 Hz. Watching the video to see how the alarms respond to these events will help you understand how they work.