For meteorologists and geologists, the Richter scale has a carefully defined meaning and is used only for purposes where that definition fits.
This per a friend of mine who does seismic stuff for NOAA: Him: The Richter number means something very specific to us and something quite different to the media. Actually, the Richter doesn't have a great deal of analytical value to us. You can say, this is a Category Four hurricane but that really tells you very little about what is going on in the storm. Richter is like that. Me: You're saying that the Richter is a poor predictor of surface disruption? Him: Well, obviously a 9 will be expected to do much more damage than a 6 but it is at best a very rough indicator. The location of the epicenter and a dozen other factors play into it. Me: So how do you assess the damage potential? Him: Lots of people think we still rely mainly on the old pendulum-and-stylus seismographs from the 1930s. Actually, we take a great many measurements in addition to seismometry. But when it comes to assessing the damage, we go outside and look, just like the TV stations do. And his final comment: By the way, did you know that when the shuttle launches we capture that on virtually every strain guage seismometer in the country? I found that interesting. On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 10:56 PM, jimlux <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/24/11 5:23 PM, Bob Bownes wrote: > >> What is the conversion factor for Richter to dBm? :) >> >> Bob >> As a guy with degrees in geology and EE. I really should know this...:) >> >> >> > Especially since both are log scales.. > > The problem is that Richter is log magnitude displacement on a particular > kind of seismometer (which is sort of a low pass filter) and dBm is log > power. However, there should be some sort of scale factor that converts it. > > I think it's energy goes as amplitude^1.5. there's also a scale factor for > how far the seismograph is from the epicenter. > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to > https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
