Does it take a while to average data from different sensors or is there another reason?
For example, I saw an earthquake today that was a 4.3 one minute after it happened then was downgraded to a 4.1 only 15 minutes later
In: Planetary Science
Have you ever been sitting there doing nothing, then sudden have to do your job?
The seismometers get startled very easily.
But seriously, it takes a few minutes to get all the available data from all the sources, that tell us where the event was centered, how deep it was and how much energy was released.
For instance, the initial estimate might be 5, but then more data comes in that shows it’s shallower and closer than they thought, so it was actually a 4.6.
Most quake monitoring websites will have something to that affect that they try to get the even listed as quickly as possible, but magnitude evolves based on the incoming data.
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