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.

 

Can fireworks be detected with a Citizen seismic station?

Can fireworks be detected with a Citizen seismic station?
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An explosion has a very different effect on sensors than an earthquake, but it is still a movement of air that can be transmitted through the ground. There is a method for calculating the movement created by a fault using what is called a 'beach ball,' which indicates the type of fault, the direction of its movement, and how it has moved. This is achieved by calculating the movement of seismic stations. When the P-wave reaches a station, the station can move up, down, left, or right, and this movement varies from the epicenter outwards. All these movements allow us to determine the origin and what has happened to that fault.

What happens with an explosion? The wave that reaches the stations is exactly the same, so the movement of all of them is identical. This would produce a single color on the 'beach ball,' making it completely one color without indicating any special movement. Therefore, an explosion is not useful for indicating how it occurred, as this type of movement is not present in explosions. The only thing that could be determined is the epicenter of the explosion.

What is certain is that the movement is felt and can be measured. Citizen seismic stations can detect it perfectly.

The video accompanying this article shows the night of June 23, 2025, which is the night of San Juan (St. John's Eve). In Catalonia and the Valencian Community, the night is celebrated by launching rockets and firecrackers, making it a good day to investigate this event with our Citizen seismic stations.

What's special about this video is that it shows the different Hz ranges into which the seismic signal is divided, making it very clear which Hz are most affected by explosions. An explosion is sudden, powerful, and immediate, so the ranges that usually trigger alarms are those of high frequencies, especially if the firecracker exploded very close to the seismic station. You can see in the video how the alarms closest to the highest Hz ranges all go off at once. This is a very visual way to understand how seismic waves, or in this case, explosive waves, work.

These waves were captured with a mid-range ADXL355 MEMS accelerometer.

The following graph shows the waves captured by a geophone on November 2, 2025. These are from the fireworks display that closed the Sant Narcís festivities in the city of Girona. The seismic station is located 1.2 km away from where the fireworks were launched, and, as you can see, they were perfectly captured by the station. They lasted approximately 15 minutes (in fact, the image on the blog's homepage is from one of these explosions).

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