The 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake (M w 9.0) that occurred on March 11, 2011, caused strong ground motion around northeastern Japan. Before the strong ground motion hit cities, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) announcements to the general public of the Tohoku district and then the warning was automatically broadcast through TV, radios and cellular phone mails. The EEW was earlier than the S wave arrival and more than 15 s earlier than the strong ground motion (intensity 5-lower or greater on the JMA scale) everywhere in the district. Seismic intensity 7 was observed for only the second time since JMA introduced instrument-based observation for intensity measurements in 1996. Intensities of 6-upper and 6-lower were widely observed at many stations in the Tohoku and Kanto districts, over an area of approximately 400 km × 100 km. The duration of strong ground motions was quite long. For the Tokyo region, JMA EEW expected intensities of 4, which was an underestimation of the observed intensity (5-upper). This underestimation can probably be attributed to the large extent of the fault rupture.

No abstract

The Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake occurred on July 16, 2007. To understand the mechanism of earthquake generation, it is important to obtain a detailed seismic activity. Since the source region of the 2007 Chuetsu-oki Earthquake lies mainly offshore of Chuetsu region, a central part of Niigata Prefecture, it is difficult to estimate the geometry of faults using only the land seismic network data. A precise aftershock distribution is essential to determine the fault geometry of the mainshock. To obtain the detailed aftershock distribution of the 2007 Chuetsu-oki Earthquake, 32 Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBSs) were deployed from July 25 to August 28 in and around the source region of the mainshock. In addition, a seismic survey using airguns and OBSs was carried out during the observation to obtain a seismic velocity structure below the observation area for precise hypocenter determination. Seven hundred and four aftershocks were recorded with high spatial resolution during the observation period using OBSs, temporally installed land seismic stations, and telemetered seismic land stations and were located using the double-difference method. Most of the aftershocks occurred in a depth range of 6-15 km, which corresponds to the 6-km/s layer. From the depth distribution of the hypocenters, the aftershocks occurred along a plane dipping to the southeast in the whole aftershock region. The dip angle of this plane is approximately 40• . This single plane with a dip to the southeast is considered to represent the fault plane of the mainshock. The regions where few aftershocks occurred are related to the asperities where large slip is estimated from the data of the mainshock. The OBS observation is indispensable to determine the precise depths of events which occur in offshore regions even close to a coast.

The precise calculation of anticipated seismic intensity is an important component of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) procedures. The EEW method adopted by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) uses event magnitude, hypocentral distance, and site amplification factor for this calculation, in which the site amplification factor is represented by a single scalar without consideration of spectrum contents. Even when two earthquakes occur at the same location with the same magnitude, their observed distributions of seismic intensity are not always the same. And even at adjacent measurement stations, the interstation difference in seismic intensity of one earthquake is not always the same as that of another earthquake. To evaluate these expected uncertainties in the current JMA EEW method, we analyzed the distribution of recorded seismic intensities from adjacent earthquakes and also compared the intensities at adjacent observation sites. The uncertainties are 0.29 JMA intensity units when the JMA magnitude is used as an index of source factor and 0.22 when the average of the observed seismic intensities is used. The uncertainties are 0.21 when site amplification factor is represented by single scalar value. These results may indicate the intrinsic precision limits of anticipated seismic intensities in the current JMA EEW method.

In 1997, two earthquakes (M6.5 and M6.3) occurred in the northwestern part of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. We carried out temporary seismic observation to obtain the detailed aftershock distribution. We constructed a 3-D P wave velocity model by inverting the travel times of aftershocks observed at 14 seismic stations in and around the focal area and relocated more than 14,000 aftershocks with the 3-D velocity model.The general features of the aftershock distribution are as follows: (1) Aftershocks of the first main shock (M6.5) are distributed with a strike of nearly E-W (N100• E) in a vertical plane with a horizontal length of 21 km and a depth range of 2 to 9 km; (2) The second main shock (M6.3) has an 'L'-shaped aftershock distribution: one plane strikes nearly E-W, which is parallel to the aftershock zone of the first main shock, and the other is a conjugate plane; (3) An obvious seismicity gap of about 3 km wide is found between the aftershock zones striking E-W for the first and second main shocks; (4) The aftershock activities are generally low around the hypocenters of the two main shocks.Our results show that most of aftershocks occurred not in high or low velocity zones, but in intermediate velocity areas. Several vertical linear distributions of aftershocks are also confirmed in the two focal zones striking E-W. These peculiar distributions suggest that the aftershock activity is affected by the underground structural boundaries.