The early warning issued after the onset of the Mw9.0 Tohoku‐Oki earthquake significantly underestimated its magnitude, saturating, 120 seconds after the earthquake began, at Mw8.1. Here we investigate whether real‐time deformation data from Japan's dense network of continuously‐recording Global Positioning System (GPS) stations could have been used to provide a more reliable rapid estimate of the earthquake's magnitude, and ultimately a more robust tsunami forecast. We use precise point positioning in real‐time mode with broadcast clock and orbital corrections to give station positions every 1 s. We then carry out a simple static inversion on a subset of stations to determine the portion of the fault that slipped and the earthquake magnitude. Unlike most previous methods, our method produces estimates of seismic moment before the earthquake rupture has completed. We find that the deformation data allow a robust magnitude estimate just ∼100 s after the earthquake onset. We also investigated the density of stations required for a robust moment magnitude estimate. Fewer than 1 station every 100 km are needed. We recommend that GPS data be incorporated into earthquake early warning systems for regions at threat from large magnitude earthquakes and tsunamis.

No abstract

Seismic waves can be an effective probe to retrieve fracture properties particularly when measurements are coupled with forward and inverse modelling. These seismic models then need an appropriate representation of the fracturing. The fractures can be modelled either explicitly, considering zero thickness frictional slip surfaces, or by considering an effective medium which incorporates the effect of the fractures into the properties of the medium, creating anisotropy in the wave velocities. In this work, we use a third approach which is a hybrid of the previous two. The area surrounding the predefined fracture is treated as an effective medium and the rest of the medium is made homogeneous and isotropic, creating a Localised Effective Medium (LEM). LEM can be as accurate as the explicit but more efficient in run-time. We have shown that the LEM model can closely match an explicit model in reproducing waveforms recorded in a laboratory experiment, for wave propagating parallel and perpendicular to the fractures. The LEM model performs close to the explicit model when the wavelength is much larger than the element size and larger than the fracture spacing. By the definition of the LEM model, we expect that as the LEM layer becomes coarser the model will start approaching the effective medium result. However, what are the limitations of the LEM and is there a balance between the stiffness, the frequency and the thickness, where the LEM performs close to an explicit model or approaches the effective medium model? To define the limits of the LEM we experiment varying fracture stiffness and source frequency. We then compare for each frequency and stiffness the explicit and effective medium with five models of LEM with different thickness. Finally, we conclude that the thick LEM layers with lower resolution perform the same as the thinner and finer resolution LEM layers for lower frequencies and higher fracture stiffness.

No abstract