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Sensors 2008, 8, 1-9
Full Research Paper
Development of an Earthquake Early Warning System Using
Real-Time Strong Motion Signals
1,
Yih-Min Wu
* and Hiroo Kanamori
1 Department of Geosciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
E-mail: drymwu@ntu.edu.tw
2 Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
E-mail: hiroo@gps.caltech.edu
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Address: No. 1, Sec. 4th, Roosevelt Rd., Dept. of Geosciences, National Taiwan Univ., Taipei, Taiwan
Tel: 886-2-2362-0054, Fax: 886-2-2364-4625, E-mail: drymwu@ntu.edu.tw
Received: 20 December 2007 / Accepted: 5 January 2008 / Published: 9 January 2008
Abstract: As urbanization progresses worldwide, earthquakes pose serious threat to lives
and properties for urban areas near major active faults on land or subduction zones
offshore. Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) can be a useful tool for reducing earthquake
hazards, if the spatial relation between cities and earthquake sources is favorable for such
warning and their citizens are properly trained to respond to earthquake warning messages.
An EEW system forewarns an urban area of forthcoming strong shaking, normally with a
few sec to a few tens of sec of warning time, i.e., before the arrival of the destructive S-
wave part of the strong ground motion. Even a few second of advanced warning time will
be useful for pre-programmed emergency measures for various critical facilities, such as
rapid-transit vehicles and high-speed trains to avoid potential derailment; it will be also
useful for orderly shutoff of gas pipelines to minimize fire hazards, controlled shutdown of
high-technological manufacturing operations to reduce potential losses, and safe-guarding
of computer facilities to avoid loss of vital databases. We explored a practical approach to
EEW with the use of a ground-motion period parameter τ
displacement amplitude parameter Pd from the initial 3 sec of the P waveforms. At a given
site, an earthquake magnitude could be determined from τ
velocity (PGV) could be estimated from Pd. In this method, incoming strong motion
2
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and a high-pass filtered vertical
c
and the peak ground-motion
c
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