Earthquake Early Warning ShakeAlert System: West Coast Wide Production Prototype

Creators: Kohler, Monica D.¹; Cochran, Elizabeth S.; Given, Doug; Guiwits, Steve; Neuhauser, Doug; Henson, Ivan; Hartog, Renate; Bodin, Paul; Kress, Victor; Thompson, Stephen; Felizardo, Claude¹; Brody, Jeff; Bhadha, Rayo¹; Schwarz, Stan

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Earthquake early warning (EEW) is an application of seismological science that can give people, as well as mechanical and electrical systems, up to tens of seconds to take protective actions before peak earthquake shaking arrives at a location. Since 2006, the U.S. Geological Survey has been working in collaboration with several partners to develop EEW for the United States. The goal is to create and operate an EEW system, called ShakeAlert, for the highest risk areas of the United States, starting with the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. In early 2016, the Production Prototype v.1.0 was established for California; then, in early 2017, v.1.2 was established for the West Coast, with earthquake notifications being distributed to a group of beta users in California, Oregon, and Washington. The new ShakeAlert Production Prototype was an outgrowth from an earlier demonstration EEW system that began sending test notifications to selected users in California in January 2012. ShakeAlert leverages the considerable physical, technical, and organizational earthquake monitoring infrastructure of the Advanced National Seismic System, a nationwide federation of cooperating seismic networks. When fully implemented, the ShakeAlert system may reduce damage and injury caused by large earthquakes, improve the nation's resilience, and speed recovery.

Additional Information

© 2017 Seismological Society of America. Published Online 6 December 2017. Data and Resources: Latency data are available upon request by contacting the following email: kohler@caltech.edu. Some plots were made using the Generic Mapping Tools v.4.2.1 (www.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt, last accessed November 2017; Wessel and Smith, 1998). Additional information about the open‐source enterprise‐class software application can be found at Nagios.org. For Common Alert Protocol (CAP) format, see https://www.fema.gov/common-alerting-protocol (last accessed November 2017). The authors wish to acknowledge the entire earthquake early warning research team, many of whom provided valuable discussions that helped inform the writing of this article. Particular thanks go to Tom Heaton, Richard Allen, and John Vidale. The authors thank Associate Editor Brendan Crowell, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) internal reviewers Sarah Minson and Glenn Biasi, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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