Earthquake Early Warning with Seismogeodesy: Detection, Location, and Magnitude Estimation

Earthquake early warning is critical to reducing injuries and casualties in case of a large magnitude earthquake. The system must rely on near-source data to minimize the time between event onset and issuance of a warning. Early warning systems typically use seismic instruments (seismometers and accelerometers), but these instruments experience difficulty maintaining reliable data in the near-source region and undergo magnitude saturation for large events. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) instruments capture the long period motions and have been shown to produce robust estimates of the true size of the earthquake source. However, GNSS is often overlooked in this context in part because it is not precise enough to record the first seismic wave arrivals (P-wave detection), an important consideration for issuing an early warning. GNSS instruments are becoming integrated into early warning, but are not yet fully exploited. Our approach involves the combination of direct measurements from collocated GNSS and accelerometer stations to estimate broadband coseismic displacement and velocity waveforms [Bock et al., 2011], a method known as seismogeodesy. We present the prototype seismogeodetic early warning system developed at Scripps and demonstrate that the seismogeodetic dataset can be used for P-wave detection, hypocenter location, and shaking onset determination. We discuss uncertainties in each of these estimates and include discussion of the sensitivity of our estimates as a function of the azimuthal distribution of monitoring stations. The seismogeodetic combination has previously been shown to be immune to magnitude saturation [Crowell et al., 2013; Melgar et al., 2015]. Rapid magnitude estimation is an important product in earthquake early warning, and is the critical metric in current tsunami hazard warnings. Using the seismogeodetic approach, we refine earthquake magnitude scaling using P-wave amplitudes (Pd) and peak ground displacements (PGD) for a large catalog of earthquakes in Japan.