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Towards Performance-Based Earthquake Early Warning

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

Type: Oral

Date: 4/20/2021

Presentation Time: 10:15 AM Pacific

Description: 

Earthquake shaking forecasts are uncertain, and so it will be impossible to always alert for earthquakes that cause significant shaking (whether the definition of “significant” is felt shaking, damaging shaking, or something else) while never alerting unnecessarily for earthquakes that produce insignificant shaking. In practice, most earthquake early warning (EEW) systems alert for lower levels of shaking than desired so as to avoid missing an alert should the shaking turn out to be significant. But this margin of error is often determined haphazardly. The earthquake engineering community already provides a methodological framework for building infrastructure that achieves some desired level of performance: performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE). In PBEE, structures are designed so that there is an acceptably high probability that they will experience the desired outcome (such as prevention of building collapse or immediate occupancy following an earthquake) over some set time horizon. We can take the same approach to EEW, and calculate the alerting criteria necessary for an early warning system to produce desired performance specified as an acceptably high probability of receiving an alert before shaking exceeds some critical threshold. Similarly, we can also compute expected system outcomes, such as the rate at which users will receive unnecessary alerts for insignificant shaking. We will present the mathematical foundation for this approach, present sample system designs and outcomes, and discuss how the expected performance of EEW systems can be communicated to the public.

Presenting Author: Sarah Minson

Student Presenter: No

Authors