《Development of an Earthquake Early Warning System Using Real-Time Strong Motion Signals》.pdf

Sensors 2008, 8, 1-9 sensors ISSN 1424-8220 © 2008 by MDPI /sensors Full Research Paper Development of an Earthquake Early Warning System Using Real-Time Strong Motion Signals Yih-Min Wu 1,* and Hiroo Kanamori 2 1 Department of Geosciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. E-mail: drymwu@.tw 2 Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. E-mail: hiroo@ * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Address: No. 1, Sec. 4th, Roosevelt Rd., Dept. of Geosciences, National Taiwan Univ., Taipei, Taiwan Tel: 886-2-2362-0054, Fax: 886-2-2364-4625, E-mail: drymwu@.tw Received: 20 December 2007 / Accepted: 5 January 2008 / Published: 9 January 2008 Abstract: As urbanization progresses worldwide, earthquakes pose serious threat to lives and properties for urban areas near major active faults on land or subduction zones offshore. Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) can be a useful tool for reducing earthquake hazards, if the spatial relation between cities and earthquake sources is favorable for such warning and their citizens are properly trained to respond to earthquake warning messages. An EEW system forewarns an urban area of forthcoming strong shaking, normally with a few sec to a few tens of sec of warning time, i.e., before the arrival of the destructive S- wave part of the strong ground motion. Even a few second of advanced warning time will be useful for pre-programmed emergency measures for various critical facilities, such as rapid-transit ve