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Peak Ground Displacement Saturates Exactly When Expected: Implications for Earthquake Early Warning

Journal Article · · Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JB017093· OSTI ID:1508560
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. US Geological Survey, Pasadena, CA (United States)
  3. US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
The scaling of rupture properties with magnitude is of critical importance to earthquake early warning (EEW) systems that rely on source characterization using limited snapshots of waveform data. ShakeAlert, a prototype EEW system that is being developed for the western United States, provides real-time estimates of earthquake magnitude based on P-wave peak ground displacements calculated at stations triggered by the event. The algorithms used in ShakeAlert assume that the displacement measurements at each station are statistically independent and that there exists a linear and time-independent relation between log peak ground displacement and earthquake magnitude. Here we challenge this basic assumption using the largest dataset assembled for this purpose to date: a comprehensive database of more than 140,000 vertical-component waveforms from M4.5–M9 earthquakes occurring near Japan from 1997 through 2018 and recorded by the K-NET and KiK-net strong-motion networks. By analyzing the time-evolution of P-wave peak ground displacements for these earthquakes, we show that there is a break, or saturation, in the magnitude-displacement scaling that depends on the length of the measurement time window. We demonstrate that the magnitude at which this saturation occurs is well-explained by a simple and non-deterministic model of earthquake rupture growth. We then utilize the predictions of this saturation model to develop a Bayesian framework for estimating posterior uncertainties in real-time magnitude estimates.
Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD); USDOE; USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
Grant/Contract Number:
89233218CNA000001
OSTI ID:
1508560
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1510164
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-18--30809
Journal Information:
Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth, Journal Name: Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 124; ISSN 2169-9313
Publisher:
American Geophysical UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Seismogeodetic P‐wave Amplitude: No Evidence for Strong Determinism journal October 2019

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Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES
Bayesian estimation
Earthquake Early Warning
Earthquake scaling
Rupture Determinism