The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) maintains the National Earthquake Monitoring and Information System which aims to provide accurate and timely information on significant earthquakes and tsunami events that may significantly impact the Philippines and ensures the accessibility and integrity of earthquake data.
This package provides an interface to this information with functions that harvest, process, and structure information from the frequent earthquake bulletins released by PHIVOLCS into machine-readable versions.
The package name lindol (pronounced /linˈdol/ [lɪn̪ˈd̪ol]) is the Tagalog word for earthquake.
What does the package do?
The lindol package provides functions that harvest, process, and structure information from the PHIVOLCS earthquake bulletins. Currently, lindol has functions for:
Building URLs for webpages containing historical and real-time summary earthquake information;
Retrieving URLs for earthquake information bulletins containing historical and real-time detailed earthquake information;
Extracting tabular data from webpages containing historical and real-time summary earthquake information;
Extracting tabular data from earthquake information bulletin webpages containing historical and real-time detailed earthquake information;
Processing tabular data from webpages containing historical and real-time summary earthquake information; and,
Processing tabular data from earthquake information bulletin webpages containing historical and real-time detailed earthquake information.
Installation
lindol is not yet on CRAN but can be installed through the panukatan R Universe with:
install.packages(
"lindol",
repos = c("https://panukatan.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org")
)or from GitHub using the pak package with:
if (!require("pak")) install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("panukatan/lindol")Usage
The main usage of lindol is to retrieve earthquake monitoring data from PHIVOLCS’s earthquake bulletins. The main functions are eq_data_summary() and eq_data_bulletin() which outputs summary and detailed earthquake information respectively. This vignette describes the structure of the PHIVOLCS earthquake information bulletin webpages and the difference between the summary and bulletin earthquake information.
Summary earthquake information
The eq_data_summary() outputs historical and current summary earthquake information. It can be used as follows:
## Load the package ----
library(lindol)
## Get the current year and current month data ----
eq_data_summary()which provides a tibble output as follows:
#> # A tibble: 1,441 × 7
#> date_time_retrieved date_time latitude longitude depth magnitude
#> <dttm> <dttm> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 14:39:00 13.5 121. 36 1.4
#> 2 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 14:33:00 16.0 121. 33 2
#> 3 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 14:03:00 7.09 127. 18 2.3
#> 4 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 13:51:00 9.79 126. 33 2.1
#> 5 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 13:48:00 7.43 124. 32 1.5
#> 6 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 13:41:00 7.09 127. 13 2.5
#> 7 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 13:35:00 8.95 126. 40 2.2
#> 8 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 11:26:00 6.96 125. 33 1.5
#> 9 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 09:47:00 18 122. 22 2.5
#> 10 2026-04-04 08:17:46 2026-04-04 08:15:00 8.61 126. 27 1.4
#> # ℹ 1,431 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: location <chr>The output has 7 fields:
date_time_retrieved- Date and time (of typePOSIXct/POSIXt) the data has been retrieved from the PHIVOLCS earthquake monitoring bulletins. This is basically a time stamp on when the user made a call toeq_data();date_time- Date and time (of typePOSIXct/POSIXt) the specific earthquake was detected and recorded. This is recorded in Philippine Standard Time (PST);longitude- Longitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;latitude- Latitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;depth- Depth (in kilometres units) of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;magnitude- Magnitude of the earthquake; and,location- Location of the earthquake in relation to a monitoring station.
The default implementation of the eq_data() function outputs earthquake monitoring data for the current month of the current year. If data for a specific year is needed, say for example for year 2020, then:
## Retrieve data for all months of year 2020 ----
eq_data_summary(.year = 2020)which gives:
#> # A tibble: 14,047 × 7
#> date_time_retrieved date_time latitude longitude depth magnitude
#> <dttm> <dttm> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 23:50:00 6.56 125. 12 2.2
#> 2 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 23:46:00 6.58 125. 9 2.1
#> 3 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 23:02:00 8.59 127. 13 3.2
#> 4 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 22:34:00 6.62 125. 13 3.6
#> 5 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 21:18:00 6.57 125. 16 2.8
#> 6 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 21:17:00 10.2 126. 18 2.9
#> 7 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 19:35:00 6.58 125. 17 3.1
#> 8 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 19:18:00 6.59 125. 13 4.9
#> 9 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 17:46:00 10.5 126. 3 3.5
#> 10 2026-04-04 08:17:48 2020-01-31 15:42:00 5.22 126. 37 3.1
#> # ℹ 14,037 more rows
#> # ℹ 1 more variable: location <chr>Detailed earthquake information
The eq_data_bulletin() outputs detailed historical and current earthquake information. It can be used as follows:
## Get the current year and current month detailed data ----
eq_data_bulletin(.year = 2018, .month = "January")which provides a tibble output as follows:
#> # A tibble: 372 × 14
#> date_time bulletin_number longitude latitude depth magnitude
#> <dttm> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
#> 1 2018-01-31 23:07:37 2 13.2 125. 25 2.8
#> 2 2018-01-31 22:32:56 2 11.7 124. 7 3.7
#> 3 2018-01-31 20:23:39 2 13.0 121. 34 3.5
#> 4 2018-01-31 18:42:34 2 14.1 120. 122 1.9
#> 5 2018-01-31 00:28:18 2 18.7 121. 22 3.3
#> 6 2018-01-30 23:54:24 2 18.6 121. 16 2.1
#> 7 2018-01-30 22:46:00 2 9.89 125. 5 3.3
#> 8 2018-01-30 22:11:51 3 19.3 121. 15 4.9
#> 9 2018-01-30 21:40:42 2 18.4 121. 8 3.1
#> 10 2018-01-30 19:55:22 2 17.0 121. 20 2.6
#> # ℹ 362 more rows
#> # ℹ 8 more variables: magnitude_type <chr>, reported_intensity <chr>,
#> # location <chr>, origin <chr>, expect_damage <chr>,
#> # expect_aftershocks <chr>, date_time_issued <dttm>, prepared_by <chr>The output has 7 fields:
date_time_retrieved- Date and time (of typePOSIXct/POSIXt) the data has been retrieved from the PHIVOLCS earthquake monitoring bulletins. This is basically a time stamp on when the user made a call toeq_data();date_time- Date and time (of typePOSIXct/POSIXt) the specific earthquake was detected and recorded. This is recorded in Philippine Standard Time (PST);longitude- Longitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;latitude- Latitude (in GPS units/decimal format) coordinate of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;depth- Depth (in kilometres units) of the hypocentre of the detected earthquake;magnitude- Magnitude of the earthquake; and,location- Location of the earthquake in relation to a monitoring station.
The default implementation of the eq_data_bulletin() function outputs earthquake monitoring data for the current month of the current year. Also, the default behaviour is to perform this data extraction sequentially i.e., every earthquake record for the specified month and year combination one after the other. This approach can take long specifically for month and year combinations that have many recorded earthquakes. The eq_data_bulletin() function includes option for parallelisation of this process by specifying the argument parallel = TRUE which, by default, will initiate 2 parallel processes. This can be increased (depending on the specifications of the machine being used) by specifying the cores argument to the desired appropriate number of processes to initiate.
For example, if data for a specific year is needed, say for example for year 2019, using parallelisation using 8 parallel processes, then:
## Retrieve data for all months of year 2024 using parallelisation ----
eq_data_bulletin(.year = 2019, parallel = TRUE, cores = 8)which gives:
#> # A tibble: 12,655 × 14
#> date_time bulletin_number longitude latitude depth magnitude
#> <dttm> <int> <dbl> <dbl> <int> <dbl>
#> 1 2019-01-31 14:55:06 2 9.64 122. 6 2.7
#> 2 2019-01-31 12:13:14 3 8.44 127. 24 3.7
#> 3 2019-01-31 11:38:57 2 9.81 126. 7 2.9
#> 4 2019-01-31 09:05:42 2 5.45 126. 53 2.2
#> 5 2019-01-31 07:14:33 2 5.85 126. 15 2.7
#> 6 2019-01-31 06:13:16 2 11.5 126 1 2.8
#> 7 2019-01-31 06:04:36 2 14.4 124. 2 1.8
#> 8 2019-01-31 05:02:56 2 10.6 125. 27 2.3
#> 9 2019-01-31 04:37:24 2 10.4 125. 26 2.2
#> 10 2019-01-31 04:06:29 2 9.77 126. 14 2.1
#> # ℹ 12,645 more rows
#> # ℹ 8 more variables: magnitude_type <chr>, reported_intensity <chr>,
#> # location <chr>, origin <chr>, expect_damage <chr>,
#> # expect_aftershocks <chr>, date_time_issued <dttm>, prepared_by <chr>Citation
If you use the lindol package in your work, please cite using the suggested citation provided by a call to the citation() function as follows:
citation("lindol")
#> To cite lindol in publications use:
#>
#> Ernest Guevarra (2026). _lindol: An Interface to the PHIVOLCS
#> Earthquake Bulletins_. R package version 0.0.9000,
#> <https://panukatan.io/lindol/>.
#>
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#>
#> @Manual{,
#> title = {lindol: An Interface to the PHIVOLCS Earthquake Bulletins},
#> author = {{Ernest Guevarra}},
#> year = {2026},
#> note = {R package version 0.0.9000},
#> url = {https://panukatan.io/lindol/},
#> }Community guidelines
Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are welcome; file issues or seek support here. If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our contributing guidelines.
This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.