Earthquake early warning feasibility in the Campania region (southern Italy) and demonstration system for public school buildings

Abstract

We present the results of a feasibility study of an earthquake early warning system (EEWS) for the Campania region (southern Italy) using schools as specific targets. The study considered the seismogenic zones as sources of potential earthquakes for the area, the Italian accelerometric network as the recording network for seismic event occurrence, and the performances of the software platform PRESToPlus for data analysis and processing. We analyze the distribution of lead-times for all possible threatening seismic sources for each municipality in the region under study by extracting the lead-time value corresponding to the 5th, 10th and 25th percentiles of the distributions. We discuss the results for the 5th percentile in order to analyze the worst-case scenario: in the case of a single site, the lead-time is expected to be larger than this value in the 95 % of the cases. Since the population distribution in Campania is uneven and most of the people live nearby the coast, whilst the most destructive earthquakes occur along the Apennine chain, we can conclude that an efficient EEWS can allow most of the schools in the area to undertake some mitigating actions. The testing of the EEWS was carried out in the high school ITIS ‘E. Majorana’, located at Somma Vesuviana, about 80 km from the seismogenic Irpinia\ud region. For this purpose, the Sentinel, an actuator made up of low-cost hardware (i.e., Arduino), was developed in close cooperation with students and teachers of the school to receive alert messages from the PRESToPlus platform and warn the school users in case of a seismic event. The EEWS and the Sentinel were successfully tested during some blind drills performed during normal school activities

An on‐site alert level early warning system for Italy

“…The decision on whether and how to initiate safety measures is still delegated to the recipients of the alert messages sent to individual systems or broadcast by SAVE through Internet. SAVE can be easily connected to an automatic interface, which is able to receive the warning and activate security actions [ Picozzi et al ., ; Emolo et al ., ]. Within this context, the rapidity and robustness of the system represent ideal features for the immediate activation of emergency operations.…”

A Review of the Technical and Socio-Organizational Components of Earthquake Early Warning Systems

“…According to Zollo et al (2014a), the system relies on the Irpinia Seismic Network (ISNet), which is formed of 31 seismic stations distributed in the Campania-Lucania region. The system is regional, and is based on a methodology that predicts the source parameters of the ongoing earthquake using various algorithms that are loaded into the main software platform called PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem (or PRESTo; Emolo et al, 2016).…”

Comparing the Performance of the NEEWS Earthquake Early Warning System Against the CWB System During the 6 February 2018 Mw 6.2 Hualien Earthquake

“…The on-site EEW approach has recently been the subject of numerous studies worldwide (Allen et al, 2009;Böse et al, 2012;Carranza et al, 2013;Caruso et al, 2017;Emolo et al, 2016;Hsu et al, 2013;Kanamori, 2005;Nakamura, 1998;Odaka et al, 2003;Peng et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2013;Zollo et al, 2010). The on-site EEW approach has recently been the subject of numerous studies worldwide (Allen et al, 2009;Böse et al, 2012;Carranza et al, 2013;Caruso et al, 2017;Emolo et al, 2016;Hsu et al, 2013;Kanamori, 2005;Nakamura, 1998;Odaka et al, 2003;Peng et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2013;Zollo et al, 2010).…”

“…The National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), Taiwan, has been developing an on-site EEW system since 2009 to provide increased lead times for regions with a higher likelihood of sustaining damage (i.e., regions near epicenter). The on-site EEW approach has recently been the subject of numerous studies worldwide (Allen et al, 2009;Böse et al, 2012;Carranza et al, 2013;Caruso et al, 2017;Emolo et al, 2016;Hsu et al, 2013;Kanamori, 2005;Nakamura, 1998;Odaka et al, 2003;Peng et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2013;Zollo et al, 2010). The NCREE implemented an on-site Early Earthquake Warning System (NEEWS) by first establishing several stations in elementary schools with a limited budget.…”