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Approaching EEW in Central America: The Readiness of Seismic Network Processing Hubs

Session: Earthquake Early Warning System in the Americas: The On-Going Effort and the State of the Art [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/20/2021

Presentation Time: 11:30 AM Pacific

Description: 

The core component of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) is a dense seismic network which streams the data in real-time in a reliable and low latency manner. Furthermore, EEW needs an always-on, efficient and fast computation platform to process the data with minimal. Further processing like dissemination, generating alerts and publication of reliable information to the public, stakeholders and others are based on the outcomes from the computational seismological systems. It is a challenge to create these infrastructures anywhere, and in particular in Central America where independent networks tend to be small in size and support, and already have significant responsibilities monitoring multiple geohazards that also include volcanoes and tsunamis.

Central America is aiming to develop reliable, highly available national EEW systems based on the current seismic networks that national agencies operate and maintain, as well as on their technical and scientific capabilities. To reinforce the EEW capabilities in this very active seismic region in America, the seismic data centers of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador in collaboration with Swiss Seismological Service are building EEW capabilities based on a uniform usage of the same seismological processing system SeisComP and its embedded EEW algorithms Virtual Seismologist and FinDer.

Each seismological center in Central America has its own attributes mainly in terms of instrumentation and computational systems. Nevertheless, adoption of similar processing architectures as well as uniform software usage, configuration and monitoring are critical in terms of maintaining high quality performance at a limited cost and can also allow networks to support each other in the long term. Staff training - for both seismologists and IT - is an important component of building centers that can optimal level of operation. This presentation is focused on the current ability of each network hub in the Central America region to provide EEW.

Presenting Author: Billy Burgoa Rosso

Student Presenter: No

Authors