Geophysical processes and biosphere: article

Аnnotation: Currently, the macroseismic data is mostly obtained through online questionnaires posted on the websites of regional and international seismological agencies. Generally, strong earthquakes provoke mass access of users to sites, which often leads to server overload, disruption of normal access to seismological sites, and, as a result, to a sharp decrease in the efficiency of collecting macroseismic data through online questionnaires. In such cases, the only way to make up for the lack of macro-seismic data is to directly ask residents to share their observations and fill out an online question-naire. The use of messengers seems to be the most suitable way because they provide a wide cover-age of the population and a high speed of information exchange. The efficiency of the method was confirmed by the example of two relatively strong earthquakes in the Baikal region (September 21, 2020, Mw = 5.6 and June 8, 2022, Mw = 5.2), accompanied by failures in the operation of the web-site. Sending a request to the earthquake eyewitnesses via the Viber messenger made it possible to increase the number of responses by 5–8 times.