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Embedding a USGS Earthquake List on a Cumulus PHP Site

How to embed a USGS earthquake list on a Cumulus PHP site: filter the feed, label origin time, and avoid flooding visitors with global M2 events.

Back to Historical weather observations and forecasts

A Cumulus site that shows earthquakes is almost always embedding a USGS catalog, not measuring the ground with the logger. The engineering problem is feed hygiene: which GeoJSON or FDSN query you poll, how you filter it, and how you caption rows so visitors in a quiet seismic region are not greeted by a scrolling wall of global magnitude-2 events. TNET Weather is not a seismic network and not a warning service. Live events belong at USGS Latest Earthquakes. This hostname does not display a live list at this URL.

The reason weather sites showed quakes at all—seismic versus meteorological observations, agencies, citation of origin time—is the tnetweather.com article at /earthquake. This Cumulus-host page is the embed.

Historical context

Cumulus publishes station HTML from templates and optional extras (realtime.txt, web tags, XML). It does not include a seismometer. Community PHP on the web host, or an iframe to a USGS map, filled a sidebar the same way RSS and lightning includes did. The historical TNET Cumulus host kept /earthquake as a stub for that slot. Original PHP, API keys, and scraped markup are not rehosted.

Treat the slot as a third-party observed catalog beside Cumulus observed weather. Mixing them in one “alerts” include is the failure this article exists to prevent.

Choose a feed that matches the audience

USGS publishes summary GeoJSON feeds by time window and magnitude cutoff, updated on a stated cycle (GeoJSON summary format; last checked 13 August 2026). The all_* series includes the smallest events in that window. The 1.0_*, 2.5_*, 4.5_*, and significant_* series raise the floor. There is also an FDSN event query with minmagnitude, bounding box or radius, and orderby (FDSN Event Web Service; last checked 13 August 2026).

An unfiltered global “all day” list is the wrong default for a personal weather page. ComCat is a comprehensive catalog. At magnitude 2, the Earth produces a large number of events that no visitor of a Phoenix- or suburb-scale Cumulus dashboard can use. Dumping them into the same column as outdoor temperature does three kinds of harm:

  1. Alarm. A long red list reads as a crisis even when every row is a distant microearthquake.
  2. Noise. The one regional event a visitor might care about is buried.
  3. Mis-attribution. Rows sit next to Cumulus tags, so they look like station detections.

Hygiene, in order:

  • Prefer a geographic constraint (bounding box or radius around the station) plus a magnitude floor appropriate to that region. A desert PWS that wants “felt or newsworthy nearby” is not served by global M2.
  • If you cannot geofilter, use a higher global cutoff (4.5 or significant) and say so in the caption: “USGS significant events worldwide; not a local seismic network.”
  • Cap the number of rows. A sidebar is not ComCat.
  • Poll no faster than the feed’s own update policy. Cache the file. Do not hammer earthquake.usgs.gov from every page view.
  • Honor USGS feed terms and the feed life cycle policy linked from the GeoJSON page. Do not scrape the interactive map HTML.

Do not invent a “TNET magnitude scale.” Use USGS mag and magType.

What the PHP page must print per row

Each row is a citation of one ComCat feature, not a Cumulus web tag.

Required visible fields:

  • Origin time in UTC (from properties.time, which is milliseconds since the epoch and is not updated).
  • Magnitude and magnitude type (mag, magType).
  • Place string and a note that coordinates/depth live on the USGS page—or print lat, lon, depth if the sidebar has room.
  • Link to properties.url (the USGS event page).
  • Automatic versus reviewed if status is present.

Required page-level caption, once:

  • “Source: USGS ANSS ComCat. Filter: [magnitude floor and geographic rule you actually used]. Feed generated: [metadata.generated as UTC]. This Cumulus site does not operate seismometers.”
  • A link to USGS Latest Earthquakes for the interactive catalog.
  • A link to weather.gov so weather hazards stay on the weather agency.

Do not:

  • Recolor USGS PAGER alert strings as if they were NWS watches. PAGER is a USGS impact product; NWS watches are weather products. Different agencies.
  • Merge earthquake rows into the Cumulus RSS item that represents “now” at the station. Station RSS is a meteorological packet; see the Cumulus RSS project and the RSS endpoint contract.
  • Sort by “distance from the webcam” unless you computed distance from the hypocenter and said so. Sorting by feed order while implying proximity is a lie.
  • Show type other than earthquake (quarry blast, explosion) without labeling the type.
  • Leave automatic locations unlabeled. They move.

Do not alarm visitors with global M2

Magnitude 2 events are routinely recorded where networks are dense. They are not a Phoenix flash-flood analogue. A Cumulus homepage that opens with twenty M2.3 rows from another continent teaches the visitor that the site is shouting. Filters are an editorial choice the operator owes the audience, not a suppression of science. The science remains on USGS, at full catalog resolution.

If the operator’s goal is “did anything large happen that I might read in the news,” significant or a high magnitude floor is the honest feed. If the goal is “what was located near this station,” FDSN with a radius and a modest floor is the honest feed. “All events, all Earth, past day” is almost never a homepage goal.

A useful test: if a visitor cannot tell from the heading whether the list is nearby or worldwide, the embed has failed.

Placement next to Cumulus weather

Keep the earthquake module visually and semantically apart from current conditions. Cumulus tags (<#temp>, rain counters, lightning if present) are station observations. USGS rows are not. A heading such as “USGS catalog (filtered)” is accurate. A heading such as “Station alerts” is not.

Lightning includes have the same third-party-versus-logger problem; the satelight wiki fragment is about imagery plus detections, not about seismicity. Do not reuse a lightning badge for quakes.

This embed is unofficial. After a felt earthquake, local emergency instructions outrank any sidebar. TNET does not issue earthquake warnings.

Modern relevance

Feed hygiene is source identity: which catalog, which filter, which time. TNET’s public explanation of observed versus modelled versus derived information is how the service works. Atmospheric evidence grouping—unrelated to ComCat—is evidence families. Neither is an earthquake API.

The Cumulus hub lists neighboring publishing notes. The tnetweather.com /earthquake article remains the place for why a weather site showed seismic rows at all.

Sources