Application of ElarmS to earthquakes in Japan

Holly Brown and Richard M. Allen
University of California Berkeley

AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 2007.

Earthquake Alarms Systems, or ElarmS, analyzes seismic waves in realtime for the purpose of providing rapid earthquake information and warning of damaging ground shaking. P-wave arrival times are used to detect and locate earthquakes, peak amplitudes and maximum predominant period of the initial P wave provide an estimate the event magnitude, and combined with available observations of peak ground shaking, predictions of damaging ground motions for the surrounding region are made. ElarmS has been calibrated using seismic data from northern and southern California. Here we both test and calibrate the ElarmS algorithms with seismic data from Japan's broadband networks. This provides a test of ElarmS in another geographical location and geological setting and also provides calibration of the algorithms for a substantial number of large magnitude (M>6) earthquakes.

© Richard M Allen