Canada’s National Earthquake Early Warning System
SUMMARY
Over the past five years, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has developed Canada’s first nation-wide Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system to rapidly detect earthquakes and deliver alerts to the public. Much like the Canadian National Seismograph Network (CNSN), the EEW network stations also provide information and data to researchers looking to better understand Canada's seismic hazard, geology, and tectonic history. The system comprises two networks: one in the west, and one in the east. The western half, in the province of British Columbia, became fully operational in August 2024. The eastern half, in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, followed in November 2025.
To establish its EEW capability, NRCan chose Nanometrics for the station instrumentation, design, and installation of 140 stations. The seismic instrumentation forming the backbone of the EEW array is the TitanSMA — an all-in-one, high-performance accelerograph — as well as additional accelerographs from another supplier. Over 190 units were installed in the network.
Image: NRCan Earthquakes Canada, "An illustration of how an EEW system works."
Data is transmitted reliably and with low latency into multiple EEW data centers, where it is received by the Nanometrics’ Apollo Server acquisition platform. Canada’s Earthquake Early Warning System notifies Canadians of seismic activity and automates the shutdown of key infrastructure. The system sends alerts to cell phones (Alert Ready), radios, and televisions, providing tens-of-seconds’ notice before the arrival of strong-motion waves, which are responsible for the kind of powerful shaking that can cause significant damage.
Image: CN, QW Station Book Index, Canadian National Earthquake Early Warning Network (QW).
Image: CN, QW Station Book Index, Canadian National Earthquake Early Warning Network (QW) combined with the Canadian National Seismic Network (CN).
SOLUTION
To address these challenges, NRCan worked collaboratively with Nanometrics, as well as other selected vendors, on a robust solution configuration that included:
TitanSMA: Best-In-Class Accelerograph for Mission-Critical Networks
The TitanSMA is a Class A strong-motion accelerograph (all-in-one accelerometer & digitizer) designed for high-precision engineering applications. It provides high dynamic range over a wide frequency band required for dependable EEW stations, with market-leading low self-noise in a single, compact chassis, which is optimal for free-field deployment.
TitanSMA is highly configurable, with the flexibility to tune data digitization and packetization to optimize latency and bandwidth performance for project specific requirements. It supports streaming using Nanometrics Protocol (NP), a full-featured real-time transmission protocol with robust automatic outage recovery, prioritization of real-time data, multicast streaming support and other capabilities to ensure reliable and prompt acquisition of seismic data (see Nanometrics Protocol section below).
Apollo Server Software: Key Data Acquisition and Management System
Nanometrics Apollo Server is Enterprise Data Center software used to acquire data streamed using the NP. Apollo Server manages end-to-end acquisition, including the automatic recovery of data missed due to communications outages, to ensure maximum data completeness at the data center. Data is efficiently forwarded to downstream processing toolchains using the industry standard SeedLink protocol.
Apollo Server also provides comprehensive network monitoring capabilities. These are vital for mission-critical, real-time public safety systems such as EEW networks, which must detect the first sign of a problem to allow immediate action and minimize downtime. Detailed real-time acquisition performance metrics are captured on a per packet basis. This data can be inspected using built-in dashboards and is also available programmatically via robust APIs for real-time tracking and alerting using external network monitoring systems.
Apollo Server supports acquisition of multicast streams and gracefully handles receipt of duplicate data. This allows implementation of sophisticated streaming topologies and data center architectures, which provide robustness through redundancy while supporting efficient synchronization across redundant toolchains.
Apollo Server has centralized fleet management tools, including bulk firmware distribution and a batch configuration utility that allows the efficient, non-disruptive execution of a network bandwidth stress test. The test involves temporarily configuring network data loggers to stream uncompressed data for a period of time to simulate the effect of a large earthquake. This capability allows operators to verify telemetry network performance under stress conditions without disrupting the normal operation of the network.
