We usually think of GPS as a way to find out where we are and how to get where we’re going. But over the past couple of years, researchers have discovered that GPS, when combined with sensors such as accelerometers and barometers, can be an important tool for evaluating and possibly predicting earthquakes and flash floods.At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described the way they are doing this by piggybacking on a preëxisting network of hundreds of GPS stations scattered throughout Southern California.

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