Initial application of the maximum likelihood earthquake location method to early warning system in South Korea

Abstract:

From the early of this year, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) began to operate the first stage of an earthquake early warning system (EEWS) and provide early warning information to the general public. The earthquake early warning system (EEWS) in the KMA is based on the Earthquake Alarm Systems version 2 (ElarmS-2), developed at the University of California Berkeley. This method estimates the earthquake location using a simple grid search algorithm that finds the location with the minimum variance of the origin time on successively finer grids. A robust maximum likelihood earthquake location (MAXEL) method for early warning, based on the equal differential times of P arrivals, was recently developed. The MAXEL has been demonstrated to be successful in determining the event location, even when an outlier is included in the small number of P arrivals. This presentation details the application of the MAXEL to the EEWS of the KMA, its performance evaluation over seismic networks in South Korea with synthetic data, and comparison of statistics of earthquake locations based on the ElarmS-2 and the MAXEL.