State of the art and progress in the earthquake early warning system in Taiwan

Abstract

We report here the recent progress and future development of real-time seismic monitoring in Taiwan, especially on earthquake early warning system (EWS) developed at the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), using the telemetered signals from strong-motion instruments. Utilizing a quick magnitude determination based on the first 10 sec of signals from a virtual and sub-network which is configured automatically, we were able to reduce the earthquake rapid reporting time to about 30 sec or less. This represents a significant step towards a more realistic earthquake early warning capability. This early warning system has been in operation at CWB since 2002. Comprehensive earthquake reports have been issued mostly in less than 30 sec, with an average of about 22 sec from the origin time. At 3 km/sec for a typical crustal shear-wave velocity, the present operation is not useful if an earthquake occurs less than about 70 km from a city, but the lead time will increase to more than 10 sec for cities at distances greater than 100 km from the earthquake source. In the latter case, a lead time of several seconds will allow pre-programmed emergency response to take place prior to the arrival of strong ground shaking. In order to offer earlier warning within an epicentral distance of less than 70 km, a τ c and Pd method was experimented. We used the Taiwan Strong-Motion Instrumentation Program (TSMIP) accelerograms recorded within epicentral distances of less than 30 km from Mw > 5.0 crustal earthquakes. This method uses the first 3-sec length records from the onset of P-waves and could issue an on-site early warning within 10 sec after the event origin time, reducing the radius of the blind zone from 70 to 25 km from the epicenter.