Japan's Earthquake Early Warning System on 11 March 2011: Performance, Shortcomings, and Changes

Fujinawa, Yukio; Noda, Yoichi

doi:10.1193/1.4000127

Cited by 65 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Existing technology, in the form of an earthquake early warning (EEW) system, can provide a potentially life‐saving amount of warning time of imminent strong earthquake shaking. Japan has invested in such a system, which has officially been in operation since 2007 (Fujinawa & Noda, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For an intensity threshold of 5L, it is possible to get a warning of up to 15–20 seconds; however, it depends on the nature and complexity of the earthquake. Shorter or longer timings might occur instead (e.g., refer to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake rupture and warning timings, as articulated in Fujinawa & Noda, ). In some situations, EEW can even provide up to 1–2 minutes of warning, but with longer warning times, shaking is generally less intense (Minson, Meier, Baltay, Hanks, & Cochran, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Residents’ Reactions to Earthquake Early Warnings in Japan

et al. 2019

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This article empirically examines the effectiveness of earthquake early warning (EEW) in Japan based on experiences of residents who received warnings before earthquake shaking occurred. In Study 1, a survey (N = 299) was conducted to investigate residents’ experiences of, and reactions to, an EEW issued in Gunma and neighboring regions on June 17, 2018. The main results were as follows. (1) People's primary reactions to the EEW were mental, not physical, and thus motionless. Most residents stayed still, not for safety reasons, but because they were focusing on mentally bracing themselves. (2) Residents perceived the EEW to be effective because it enabled them to mentally prepare, rather than take physical protective actions, before strong shaking arrived. (3) In future, residents anticipate that on receipt of an EEW they would undertake mental preparation as opposed to physical protective actions. In Study 2, a survey (N = 450) was conducted on another EEW issued for an earthquake offshore of Chiba Prefecture on July 7, 2018. Results were in line with those of Study 1, suggesting that the findings described above are robust. Finally, given people's lack of impetus to undertake protective action on receipt of an EEW, this article discusses ways to enhance such actions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Residents’ Reactions to Earthquake Early Warnings in Japan

et al. 2019

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“…If such real‐time alerts are timely and sufficiently accurate, they allow EEW end users to trigger a wide range of protective emergency actions that can greatly reduce earthquake damage [e.g., Strauss and Allen , ]. Operating EEW systems have already provided useful public warnings during several large earthquakes, including the 2016 M w 7.0 Kumamoto, Japan [ Kodera et al ., ], the 2011 M w 9.0 Tohoku, Japan [ Fujinawa and Noda , ], and the 2012 M w 7.4 Oxaca, Mexico, earthquakes [ Cuéllar et al ., ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How “good” are real‐time ground motion predictions from Earthquake Early Warning systems?

Meier

2017

JGR Solid Earth

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Real‐time ground motion alerts, as can be provided by Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems, need to be both timely and sufficiently accurate to be useful. Yet how timely and how accurate the alerts of existing EEW algorithms are is often poorly understood. In part, this is because EEW algorithm performance is usually evaluated not in terms of ground motion prediction accuracy and timeliness but in terms of other metrics (e.g., magnitude and location estimation errors), which do not directly reflect the usefulness of the alerts from an end user perspective. Here we attempt to identify a suite of metrics for EEW algorithm performance evaluation that directly quantify an algorithm's ability to identify target sites that will experience ground motion above a critical (user‐defined) ground motion threshold. We process 15,553 recordings from 238 earthquakes with M > 5 (mostly from Japan and southern California) in a pseudo‐real‐time environment and investigate two end‐member EEW methods. We use the metrics to highlight both the potential and limitations of the two algorithms and to show under which circumstances useful alerts can be provided. Such metrics could be used by EEW algorithm developers to convincingly demonstrate the added value of new algorithms or algorithm components. They can complement existing performance metrics that quantify other relevant aspects of EEW algorithms (e.g., false event detection rates) for a comprehensive and meaningful EEW performance analysis.

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“…After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and 10 Tourism (MLIT) proposed to further increase the seismic capacity of housing and public facilities and improve the disaster reduction performance of government buildings (MLIT, 2011). Besides, Japan has a well-developed public earthquake early warning system (Fujinawa and Noda, 2013). At the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, several million people near the epicentre received the earthquake early warning and had 15 to 20 seconds to prepare for the worst shaking.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Population vulnerability of earthquake refers to the situation caused by earthquake that affects the probability and the extent of damage (Pelling et al, 2004). With 20 continuous growth of global population and large-scale urbanization, the threat to human safety from earthquake will be larger. Our technological level is not advanced enough to accurately predict the earthquake, but we can study the earthquake from the following two aspects, so the casualties caused by the earthquake could be reduced as much as possible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Quick Assessment Model of Casualties for Asia based on the Vulnerability of Earthquake

Zhang

Lin

Liu

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Abstract. In order to make a scientific emergency strategic decision after an earthquake, casualties need to be estimated rapidly. Asia is the most earthquake-prone continent in the world. In this paper, by spatial statistic and regressive analysis of historical Asian earthquake data from 1990 to 2012, vulnerability curves portraying the empirical relationship between the magnitude of an earthquake event and the casualty rate caused by it were created for countries of six-groups and the Quick 10 Assessment Model of Earthquake Casualties for Asia (QAMECA) was developed. The casualty rate was defined as the ratio of the sum of injuries and deaths in an earthquake to the number of people living in the earthquake-affected region. Thirtyone earthquake events from 2013 to 2016 were used to validate this model, and the validation results were good with actual casualties of twenty-one were within the range estimated by the model and the biases of eight out of ten were less than one hundred percent. The two input parameters of QAMECA were magnitude and location of epicenter of an earthquake and 15 earthquake casualties can be estimated immediately after earthquake has occurred. As a consequence, QAMECA can be used to estimate earthquake casualties for Asian countries and aid decision making in international emergency relief in the future.

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Japan's Earthquake Early Warning System on 11 March 2011: Performance, Shortcomings, and Changes

Cited by 65 publications

References 10 publications

Residents’ Reactions to Earthquake Early Warnings in Japan

Residents’ Reactions to Earthquake Early Warnings in Japan

How “good” are real‐time ground motion predictions from Earthquake Early Warning systems?

The Quick Assessment Model of Casualties for Asia based on the Vulnerability of Earthquake

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