Real-Time Earthquake Monitoring for Claude Agents with Katzilla's USGS Integration

Why Earthquake Data Belongs in Your AI Agent

Seismic events don't wait for business hours. Whether you're building a disaster-response assistant, a logistics agent that needs to reroute shipments around affected infrastructure, or a news summarization bot, having live USGS earthquake feeds available to Claude can make the difference between a reactive and a truly proactive agent.

Katzilla (katzilla.dev) aggregates 300+ free public data sources — including USGS earthquakes, FEMA disaster declarations, NWS weather alerts, and more — behind a single authenticated REST endpoint. Today we'll use the USGS integration to build a Claude agent that monitors global seismic activity in real time.

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Step 1: Get Your Katzilla API Key

Head to katzilla.dev and sign up for a free account. Once verified, copy your API key from the dashboard. You'll need it for both the MCP config and any direct SDK calls.

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Step 2: Configure the MCP Server

Claude agents use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect to external tools. Add Katzilla as an MCP server in your claude_desktop_config.json (or your agent's equivalent config file):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "katzilla": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@katzilla/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "KATZILLA_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE",
        "KATZILLA_BASE_URL": "https://api.katzilla.dev/v1"
      }
    }
  }
}

Save the file and restart Claude Desktop (or your agent runner). The Katzilla MCP server will register all available tools automatically — including usgs_earthquakes, nws_alerts, fema_disasters, and 290+ others.

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Step 3: Query Live Earthquake Data

With the MCP server running, Claude can now call the USGS tool directly. Here's how a typical query looks using the Katzilla Node.js SDK if you're building a custom agent wrapper:

import Katzilla from '@katzilla/sdk';

const katzilla = new Katzilla({ apiKey: process.env.KATZILLA_API_KEY });

async function getRecentSignificantEarthquakes() {
  const today = '2026-05-26';
  const threeDaysAgo = '2026-05-23';

  const result = await katzilla.usgs.earthquakes({
    starttime: threeDaysAgo,
    endtime: today,
    minmagnitude: 5.0,
    orderby: 'magnitude',
    limit: 10,
  });

  return result.features.map((quake) => ({
    location: quake.properties.place,
    magnitude: quake.properties.mag,
    time: new Date(quake.properties.time).toISOString(),
    depth_km: quake.geometry.coordinates[2],
    alert: quake.properties.alert ?? 'none',
  }));
}

const quakes = await getRecentSignificantEarthquakes();
console.log(JSON.stringify(quakes, null, 2));

This returns a clean array of the ten strongest earthquakes from the past 72 hours, including USGS alert levels (green / yellow / orange / red) that Claude can reason about directly.

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Step 4: Give Claude a System Prompt

Once the MCP tool is live, steer Claude's behavior with a focused system prompt:

You are a seismic monitoring assistant. When asked about earthquake activity,
always call the usgs_earthquakes tool with minmagnitude 4.5 and a 24-hour
window ending today (2026-05-26). Summarize results by region, flag any event
with an alert level of orange or red as urgent, and cross-reference with
fema_disasters if a US location is affected.

This instruction chain means Claude will automatically correlate USGS data with FEMA disaster declarations — giving users a richer situational picture without extra prompting.

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Combining Earthquake Data with Other Katzilla Sources

The real power of Katzilla is composition. In a single agent session you can:

• Pull USGS earthquakes to detect a magnitude 6.8 event near a port city
• Query WTO trade data to estimate which supply chains run through that region
• Check NWS weather alerts for compounding hazards like tsunami watches
• Look up FEMA disaster declarations to see if federal aid has been triggered

All from one API key, one MCP config, zero extra auth flows.

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Next Steps

Deploy your earthquake-aware Claude agent to any environment that supports MCP — Claude Desktop, Bedrock, or a custom Node/Python server. Visit katzilla.dev for full SDK docs, rate limit details, and the complete list of 300+ supported data sources.