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Caltech

Seismo Lab Brown Bag Seminar

Wednesday, February 21, 2024
12:00pm to 1:00pm
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South Mudd 254
The Southern California Seismic Network: Earthquake Early Warning Operations and Research
Jessie K. Saunders, Seismo Lab, SCSN, Caltech,

Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems aim to rapidly detect earthquakes and issue alerts of impending shaking before the shaking arrives. In this talk, I highlight recent EEW developments conducted at the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN), with specific application to the ShakeAlert EEW system for the West Coast of the United States. ShakeAlert is a cooperative project between the United States Geological Survey and partner institutions, including Caltech. Alongside providing real-time seismic data streams to ShakeAlert using the infrastructure of the SCSN, the SCSN helps operate and develop improvements to several of the component algorithms in ShakeAlert, particularly the Finite-Fault Rupture Detector (FinDer) and the Earthquake Information to Ground Motion (eqInfo2GM) algorithms. Recent proposed developments to both algorithms refine ground-motion predictions and will improve alert accuracy in ShakeAlert. I also discuss additional research in EEW approaches that may be considered for future incorporation into ShakeAlert, including the ground-motion-based Propagation of Local Undamped Motion (PLUM) algorithm and applications using fiber-optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data. These approaches will add variety to ShakeAlert in terms of input data type as well as how alert region information is determined, which will improve the robustness of the EEW system.