Offline Performance of the Filter Bank EEW Algorithm in the 2014 M6.0 South Napa Earthquake

Medium size events like the M6.0 South Napa earthquake are very challenging for EEW: the damage such events produce can be severe, but it is generally confined to relatively small zones around the epicenter and the shaking duration is short. This leaves a very short window for timely EEW alerts. Algorithms that wait for several stations to trigger before sending out EEW alerts are typically not fast enough for these kind of events because their blind zone (the zone where strong ground motions start before the warnings arrive) typically covers all or most of the area that experiences strong ground motions. At the same time, single station algorithms are often too unreliable to provide useful alerts.

The filter bank EEW algorithm is a new algorithm that is designed to provide maximally accurate and precise earthquake parameter estimates with minimum data input, with the goal of producing reliable EEW alerts when only a very small number of stations have been reached by the p-wave. It combines the strengths of single station and network based algorithms in that it starts parameter estimates as soon as 0.5 seconds of data are available from the first station, but then perpetually incorporates additional data from the same or from any number of other stations. The algorithm analyzes the time dependent frequency content of real time waveforms with a filter bank. It then uses an extensive training data set to find earthquake records from the past that have had similar frequency content at a given time since the p-wave onset. The source parameters of the most similar events are used to parameterize a likelihood function for the source parameters of the ongoing event, which can then be maximized to find the most likely parameter estimates.

Our preliminary results show that the filter bank EEW algorithm correctly estimated the magnitude of the South Napa earthquake to be ~M6 with only 1 second worth of data at the nearest station to the epicenter. This estimate is then confirmed when updates based on more data from stations at farther distances become available. Because these early estimates saturate at ~M6.5, however, the magnitude estimate might have had to be considered a minimum bound.