The potential for earthquake early warning in southern California.
Earthquake mitigation efforts in the United States currently use long-term probabilistic hazard assessments and rapid post-earthquake notification to reduce the potential damage of earthquakes. Here we present the seismological design for and demonstrate the feasibility of a short-term hazard warning system. Using data from past earthquakes, we show that our Earthquake Alarm System (ElarmS) could, with current TriNet instrumentation, issue a warning a few to tens of seconds ahead of damaging ground motion. The system uses the frequency content of the P-wave arrival to determine earthquake magnitude, an approach that allows magnitude determination before any damaging ground motion occurs.
Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA. rallen@geology.wisc.edu
Richard M
RM
Allen
Hiroo
H
Kanamori