Early Warning and rapid assessment of earthquake damage potential

GFZ personnel participating to WP4:
R. Wang, S. Parolai, D. Bindi (Postdoc funded by REAKT),Y. Zhang (Postdoc funded by REAKT)

Task 4.1. The physical grounds of early warning: Real-time estimation of seismic source properties, uncertainties and resolution
(AMRA, GFZ, ETHZ, CNRS, NIEP, NTU)

• GFZ will work at the rapid and reliable reconstruction of the earthquake source during or soon after the rupture process development which can provide insights on the mechanisms the slip builds up on the rupture surface during the initial stages of the fracture process but also it provides with an useful information about the spatial rupture distribution to be used for computation of reliable shake-maps and damage scenario.This information can be now obtained by inversion of slip integrating near field deformation data derived both from high frequency, continuous GPS and strong motion data. In order to obtain the correct displacement from strong motion data needed as input for the inversion we will apply an automatic improved procedure we developed that is fast and robust.

Task 4.2. Engineering applications of early warning
(AMRA, KOERI, GFZ, ETHZ,NIEP)  

• The activities of GFZ within Task 4.2 are strongly connected to those carried out within WP7.

Task 4.3. Mobile early-warning seismic network
(GFZ, AMRA)

• In this framework AMRA and GFZ intend to exploit the SOSEWIN and WISE systems capabilities during foreshock and aftershock sequences, for the rapid analysis and characterization of the ground motion, quick characterization of site effects and the structural health monitoring of critical infrastructures. With this aim a new mobile system will be designed and tested at a prototype level in Irpinia (southern Italy) test-site area of the project for the rapid deployment and prompt notification of early warning messages based on threshold-based methods for real-time data processing. A new prototype of SOSEWIN stations will be developed by GFZ and tested in-situ, with the integration of a digital video-camera. The system is aimed at the high resolution, real-time structural health monitoring for damage detection within buildings, analyzing images of structural elements (e.g. beams, columns, beam-column joints and the staircase) and applying dedicated pattern recognition algorithms. The joint analysis of ground motion recordings and images, may allows to define calibration relationships to be used for vulnerability assessment even in those areas where only cameras are available.

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