As you may have heard, since December 28, 2019, Puerto Rico has experienced a highly active seismic season. Since then, the lives of Puerto Ricans who live in the southern and southwestern regions of the island have not been the same. I personally experienced a few of those during my winter vacation in Puerto Rico. Since then, I constantly check the earthquake app and the family group chat, especially in the middle of the night just to know that everyone is safe.

After all this, I decided to start looking for data. I was curious about how many events we had before, their intensity, frequency, highest magnitude, etc. To answer those questions I pulled data from the USGS website.

I extracted the data by using the query method with geojson format of the USGS earthquake API. You can find more details about this API here.

Here is the result of the query posted above, feel free to take a look: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query?format=geojson&minlatitude=17&maxlatitude=20&minlongitude=-69&maxlongitude=-63.5&starttime=2020-08-01T00:00:00&endtime=2020-08-10T23:59:59

After that, I reviewed the output and selected those fields I wanted to keep. Then parsed, cleaned, and saved the data in a pandas data frame.

#gis #geopandas #geojson #python #pandas-dataframe