Fast Regional Magnitude Determination at INGV

The recent, very large earthquakes in the Indian Ocean and Indonesia have shown the importance of rapid magnitude determination for tsunami warning. In the Mediterranean region, destructive tsunamis have occurred repeatedly in the past; however, because of the proximity of the tsunami sources to populated coasts, very rapid analysis is necessary for effective warning. Reliable estimates of the earthquake location and size should be available within tens of seconds after the first arriving P-waves are recorded at local and regional distances. Currently in Europe there is no centralized agency such as the PTWC for the Pacific Ocean dedicated to issue tsunami warnings, though, recent initiatives, such as the NEAMTWS (North-East Atlantic and Mediterranean Tsunami Warning System), aim toward the establishment of such an agency. Thus established seismic monitoring centers, such as INGV, Rome, are currently relied upon for rapid earthquake analysis and information dissemination. In this study, we describe the recent, experimental implementation at the INGV seismic center of a procedure for rapid magnitude determination at regional distances based on the Mwp methodology (Tsuboi et al., 1995), which exploits information in the P-wave train. For our Mwp determinations, we have implemented an automatic procedure that windows the relevant part of the seismograms and picks the amplitudes of the first two largest peaks, providing within seconds after each P arrival an estimate of earthquake size. Manual revision is completed using interactive software that presents an analysis with the seismograms, amplitude picks and magnitude estimates. We have compared our Mwp magnitudes for recent earthquakes within the Mediterranean region with Mw determined through the Harvard CMT procedure. For the majority of the events, the Mwp and Mw magnitudes agree closely, indicating that the rapid Mwp estimates forms a useful tool for effective tsunami warning on a regional scale.