Real time earthquake information and tsunami estimation system for Indonesia, Philippines and Central-South American regions

Abstract:

Southeast Asia as well as Central-South American regions are within the most active seismic regions in the world. To contribute to the understanding of source process of earthquakes the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention NIED maintains the international seismic Network (ISN) since 2007. Continuous seismic waveforms from 294 broadband seismic stations in Indonesia, Philippines, and Central-South America regions are received in real time at NIED, and used for automatic location of seismic events. Using these data we perform automatic and manual estimation of moment tensor of seismic events (Mw>4.5) by using the SWIFT program developed at NIED. We simulate the propagation of local tsunamis in these regions using a tsunami simulation code and visualization system developed at NIED, combined with CMT parameters estimated by SWIFT. The goals of the system are to provide a rapid and reliable earthquake and tsunami information in particular for large seismic, and produce an appropriate database of earthquake source parameters and tsunami simulations for research.

The system uses the hypocenter location and magnitude of earthquakes automatically determined at NIED by the SeisComP3 system (GFZ) from the continuous seismic waveforms in the region, to perform the automated calculation of moment tensors by SWIFT, and then carry out the automatic simulation and visualization of tsunami. The system generates maps of maximum tsunami heights within the target regions and along the coasts and display them with the fault model parameters used for tsunami simulations. Tsunami calculations are performed for all events with available automatic SWIFT/CMT solutions. Tsunami calculations are re-computed using SWIFT manual solutions for events with Mw>5.5 and centroid depths shallower than 100 km. Revised maximum tsunami heights as well as animation of tsunami propagation are also calculated and displayed for the two double couple solutions by SWIFT.

Acknowledgments

Real-time seismic data from Indonesia and Philippines is received at NIED in the framework of cooperative research projects with BMKG (Indonesia), PHIVOLCS (Philippines), and GFZ (Germany). Seismic data from Central and South America is obtained from IRIS as well as the Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory of Chile.