Rapid Assessment of Damage Potential of Earthquakes in Taiwan from the Beginning of P Waves

Abstract

To rapidly assess the potential for damage of an earthquake for purposes of earthquake early warning in Taiwan, we used the peak displacement and velocity amplitudes of the first 3 sec of the P wave. The vertical-component records, highpass filtered at 0.075 Hz, are used. We found that the peak initial-displacement amplitude (Pd) correlates well with the peak ground-motion displacement (PGD) and the peak ground-motion velocity (PGV) at the same site. When Pd Ͼ 0.5 cm, the event is most likely damaging. If Pd is combined with the period parameter s c , determined in an earlier study, then s c ‫ן‬ Pd provides an even more robust parameter for assessing the potential for damage.

The Status of Earthquake Early Warning around the World: An Introductory Overview

“…The use of the peak displacement, velocity, or acceleration of the first few seconds, typically three seconds, of the P wave has been shown to scale with magnitude (Wu and Kanamori 2005b;Zollo et al 2006;Wu and Kanamori 2008a) and ground motion Wu and Kanamori 2005a). The peak displacement, referred to as P d , is usually found to be the most robust amplitude parameter provided that integration or double integration of the waveform at a station is possible.…”

“…This is possible using a combination of the P-wave parameters described above. The simplest approach is to look for a scaling relation between the P-wave amplitude and the peak ground-shaking (e.g., Wu and Kanamori 2005b). However, small magnitude earthquakes may have very large amplitude but high frequency spikes.…”

“…The τ c -P d method is another onsite method that combines two of the P-wave parameters described above (Wu and Kanamori 2005a;Wu and Kanamori 2005b;Kanamori 2008a, 2008b). When a station triggers on the P-wave arrival, τ c is used to estimate magnitude and P d to estimate peak ground velocity (PGV).…”

Real-time numerical shake prediction and updating for earthquake early warning

“…They calculate peak ground motion by applying ground motion prediction equation (GMPE) of magnitude and distance between epicenter and the specific location. The amplitude of P wave (Wu and Kanamori 2005;Kanda et al 2009), the dominant ground motion period, and average ground motion period (Nakamura 1988;Allen and Kanamori 2003;Wu et al 2007) are proposed to predict the upcoming peak ground motions. The systems have operated in many countries such as Japan for the general public (Hoshiba et al 2008;Hoshiba and Ozaki 2014) and have been investigated in the USA, Taiwan of China, the European Union, Turkey, and other countries and regions (e.g., Alcik et al 2009;Hsiao et al 2009;Gasparini and Manfredi 2014;Kuyuk et al 2013).…”

A Test of Earthquake Early Warning System Using Low Cost Accelerometer in Hualien, Taiwan

“…Palert can record three-component acceleration and also can perform real-time integration to obtain velocity and displacement. Once an earthquake P wave is detected by the triggering algorithms embedded in the sensor, the sensor will compute the average period ( c  ; [10][11][12][13][14]) and peak amplitude of the filtered vertical displacement (Pd; [12][13][14][15]) from the first few seconds of the P-wave and accordingly send an earthquake alarm signal for on-site EEW purpose. The triggering algorithms include continuous monitoring of acceleration, displacement, and ShortTerm-Average (STA)/ Long-Term-Average (LTA) ratio [16].…”