Cities are loud places. Traffic, trains, and machinery generate a lot of noise. While it’s a mere inconvenience much of the time, it can become a deadly problem when it comes to detecting earthquakes. That’s because it’s difficult to discern an approaching earthquake amid all the usual vibrations in bustling cities.

Researchers from Stanford have found a way to get a clearer signal. They’ve created an algorithm, described in a paper in Science Advances today, that they claim improves the detection capacity of earthquake monitoring networks in cities and other built-up areas. By filtering out background seismic noise, it can boost the overall signal quality and recover signals that may have previously been too weak to register. 

Algorithms trained to sift out this background noise could be of particular use to mo