Monday, December 5, 2011

Hybrid GPS-Seismic System Aims to Accelerate Earthquake Hazard Response

First responders, public safety officials, stand to benefit from novel system developed to reduce magnitude assessment time

Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego

Japanese seismologists required approximately 20 minutes to accurately determine the full magnitude of last March's massive earthquake off Japan, precious moments for disaster response activation. Now scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are developing a next-generation detection system they believe could drastically shrink that assessment time down to two to three minutes.

Traditional seismic instruments charged with determining vital earthquake information for rapid hazard assessment have relied on devices that measure ground motions with exquisite precision, but lack the ability to produce rapid views of large seismic events because they do not directly measure ground motion. GPS networks do and therefore are complementary to the more precise seismic data.

At the 2011 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, Scripps research geodesist Yehuda Bock, director of the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center (SOPAC), and Scripps graduate students Brendan Crowell and Diego Melgar, will present plans to combine the best of both worlds. The researchers hope to have a new system in place in six months to forecast, assess and even mitigate large natural hazard events as part of a new information system that could benefit first responders, other public safety decision makers and eventually the public. (IN42A-01 · Thursday, Dec. 8, 10:20 a.m. · Moscone Room 102)

Bock and his team are retroactively testing the system on the devastating March 11 magnitude 9 Tohoku-Oki earthquake as well as other large earthquakes such as the 2010 7.2 quake in Baja California's El Mayor-Cucapah region.

"Early warning systems are typically done with seismic instruments, which detect the primary wave that hits the monitoring stations and then there's somewhat of a prediction about when the secondary waves will arrive and how intense they will be," said Bock. However, seismic instruments alone are not suitable for responding to large earthquakes, he said, since they cannot rapidly distinguish between a magnitude 6.5 and a magnitude 9 event.

"For tsunamis and emergency alerts to major cities, there's a window of opportunity to provide a warning," he said. "Our approach using both GPS and seismic instruments can characterize events within two to three minutes-a significant improvement since the first devastating tsunami waves in Japan arrived 30 minutes after the earthquake."

In the tectonically active Western United States, hundreds of real-time GPS stations are now transmitting earthquake data from Southern California, throughout the San Andreas Fault, the San Francisco Bay area and the Pacific Northwest.

Bock and his team are incorporating individual seismic stations featuring earthquake-detecting accelerometer instruments into a real-time "geodetic sensor web" in which instruments pool information, thereby enhancing the fidelity of the entire seismic/GPS system. He and Melgar are working with Mexican authorities to upgrade their national seismic network with real-time GPS technology developed at Scripps.

The research is being funded by NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program through its Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO).


RELATED PRESENTATIONS:

G33C-07 · Wednesday, Dec. 7, 3:10 - 3:25 p.m. · Moscone Room 3024
"REAL-TIME MODELING OF GPS AND ACCELEROMETER DATA FOR EARTHQUAKE EARLY WARNING AND RAPID HAZARD ASSESSMENT"

IN42A · Thursday, Dec. 8, 10:20 - 10:35 a.m. · Moscone Room 102
"NEXT-GENERATION GEODETIC STATION FOR NATURAL HAZARDS RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS (INVITED)"

S51F-06 · Friday, Dec. 9, 9:15 - 9:30 a.m. · Moscone Rooms 2022-2024
"REAL-TIME MOMENT TENSOR INVERSION AND CENTROID LOCATION FOR LARGE EVENTS FROM LOCAL AND REGIONAL DISPLACEMENT RECORDS"

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About Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,400, and annual expenditures of approximately $170 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates robotic networks, and one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration. Birch Aquarium at Scripps serves as the interpretive center of the institution and showcases Scripps research and a diverse array of marine life through exhibits and programming for more than 415,000 visitors each year. Learn more at scripps.ucsd.edu.

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