A ThresholdBased Earthquake EarlyWarning System

Authors: M Picozzi S Colombelli A Zollo M Carranza E Buforn

Publish Date: 2014/12/18

Volume: 172, Issue: 9, Pages: 2467-2480

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Abstract

The south of the Iberian Peninsula is situated at the convergence of the Eurasian and African plates This region experiences large earthquakes with long separation in time the best known of which was the great 1755 Lisbon Earthquake which occurred SW of San Vicente Cape SW Iberian Peninsula The high risk of damaging earthquakes has recently led Carranza et al Geophys Res Lett 40 2013 to investigate the feasibility of an EEWS in this region Analysis of the geometry for the Iberian seismic networks and the San Vicente Cape area led the authors to conclude that a thresholdbased approach which would not require realtime location of the earthquake might be the best option for an EEWS in SW Iberia In this work we investigate this hypothesis and propose a new EEW approach that extends standard Pwave thresholdbased singlestation analysis to the whole network The proposed method enables realtime estimation of the potential damage at stations that are triggered by Pwaves and those which are not triggered with the advantage of greater leadtimes for release of alerts Results of tests made with synthetic data mimicking the scenario of the great 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and those conducted by applying the new approach to available recordings indicate that an EEW estimation of the potential damage associated with an event in the San Vicente Cape area can be obtained for a very large part of the Iberian PeninsulaWe would like to thank K Fleming for his comments and suggestions that allowed us to significantly improve the manuscript K Fleming kindly also improved the English This work was partially supported by MINECO projects CGL201019803C0301 and CGL201345724C31 and by the INNOCAMPUS project Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Orden CIN/1934/2010 and the REAKTStrategies and tools for Real Time Earthquake RisK ReducTion FP7 European project funded from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under Grant Agreement No 282862

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