Intensity Lab

About

Intensity Lab

A prototype and test platform for creating compelling post-earthquake science content that is accurate, visual, and shareable, to help the public understand seismic intensity in terms they can see and feel.

Why this exists

Four conditions make site-specific intensity content worth building now.

A single magnitude carries limited value

During southern California earthquakes, a tenth of a magnitude unit could be the news story. That distinction means very little to anyone deciding what to do next. The useful question is the intensity, city by city: what did the shaking actually do here, and here, and here.

The standard products are twenty years familiar

ShakeMap and ShakeMovie have been the post-earthquake visuals for two decades. They remain authoritative and essential. But an audience that has seen the same map for twenty years is an audience with room for new content built on the same science.

Earthquake information travels many channels

It is no longer the six o'clock news. Earthquake information moves through social feeds, video platforms, messaging apps, and search. Content built for one broadcast format does not serve all of them.

Attention peaks immediately, then fades

An earthquake in a populated area generates intense, concentrated interest in earthquake science. That interest is greatest in the minutes and hours after the shaking stops, which makes rapid availability a design requirement rather than a nice property. Content that arrives a week later has missed its audience.

How Intensity Lab developed

  1. Origin

    A self-funded site for California intensity reports

    Intensity Lab began as a self-funded website built by Philip Maechling to generate site-specific intensity reports for California earthquakes. The site polled the USGS ComCat catalog and published MMI notifications to its homepage and to social media after significant events. An early version generated Google Earth tours that opened above California, zoomed into the epicenter, then flew to the affected population center.

    The Intensity Lab website as it appeared in 2020: the USGS instrumental intensity scale across the top, a left-hand menu, and a list of intensity reports naming Ridgecrest, California City and Barstow with their distance from an M3.5 Ridgecrest earthquake.
    The site in 2020. Each report named a place, its intensity in words as well as Roman numerals, and its distance from the epicenter, and went out to social media as it was published. The format has changed; the argument has not.
    Frame from an early Intensity Lab animation: three bowling pins on a block, captioned Intensity Seven (VII) shaking in Pacoima, California, 12 km from the M6.7 Northridge earthquake of January 17, 1994.
    An early site-oriented intensity animation: Intensity VII shaking at Pacoima, 12 km from the 1994 M6.7 Northridge earthquake. The same idea drives the animations the site produces today. Credit: Philip Maechling.

  2. SCEC and NVIDIA

    Simulated ground motion meets a production physics engine

    Philip and other SCEC researchers worked with NVIDIA engineers to combine physics-based ground motion simulations with physics-based seismic intensity animations. Ground motions were computed with SCEC simulation software on GPU supercomputers; NVIDIA rendered the response of everyday objects to those motions with ray tracing and a rigid-body physics engine. The result was shown as an interactive demonstration at NVIDIA's SC19 exhibit in Denver, where an operator could feed in ground motions from a scenario earthquake and watch a room respond.

    Ray-traced kitchen interior mid-earthquake: dishes, glasses and fruit thrown to the floor, cabinet doors swung open.
    A site-oriented intensity animation of a kitchen 100 km from an M9.2 Cascadia earthquake, rendered with updated physics in March 2020. Credit: Peter Messmer and Mathias Hummel, NVIDIA.

    The collaboration established the point this site is built on: viewers understand immediately that intensity is site-based, and that two locations can experience the same earthquake very differently.

  3. 2026 to now

    Acquired by Research Software Systems LLC

    In 2026, intensitylab.com was acquired by Research Software Systems LLC, which has restarted development. The goal is to improve site-specific seismic intensity estimates and to build on the SCEC and NVIDIA work: intensity animations driven by physics-based ground motion simulations, produced automatically after real earthquakes rather than assembled by hand for a scenario.

What it runs on

Intensity Lab computes Modified Mercalli Intensity estimates for earthquakes in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, northern Mexico and western Idaho/Montana. Observed shaking comes from USGS ShakeMap, with independent estimates from four NGA-West2 ground motion models computed with GEM OpenQuake. Site conditions come from the SCEC Unified Community Velocity Model, and the simulated seismograms behind the animations are computed on the SCEC Broadband Platform through the BBP Services API.

Full technical documentation →

Who runs it

Intensity Lab is developed and operated by Research Software Systems LLC, a scientific software development and systems integration company. Its work draws on three decades of building real-time and high-performance scientific software for seismology and earthquake engineering, including USGS ANSS earthquake monitoring software, OpenSHA, OpenQuake, the SCEC Broadband Platform, UCVM, CSEP and CyberShake.

Principal
Philip J. Maechling ORCID 0000-0002-9221-7068

Contact

Questions, bug reports, data issues, and collaboration inquiries are welcome at info@intensitylab.com. Organizations relying on Intensity Lab data for operational purposes should get in touch about commercial support agreements.

Send feedback → Read our vision

Intensity Lab is an independent project and is not an official source of earthquake information. It is not affiliated with USGS, Caltech, SCEC, GEM, NVIDIA, or any other organization whose data or software it uses. Read the full disclaimer →