Testing early warning with this week’s Canterbury earthquake

With 60%g acceleration recorded near the epicentre ( ⭐ ), some frightening levels of shaking followed this week’s Mw5.6 South Island Aotearoa/NZ quake. 😥

An operational Early Warning System would have provided some precious seconds of warning 📳 – see animation’s red regions showing warning ahead of shaking.

This is a very encouraging result despite this low magnitude earthquake occurring in one of our most sparsely instrumented regions! 👍

Acknowledging Resilience to Nature’s Challenges funding our research programme with PhD student Rasika Nandana and Prof Martha Savage; and the CRISiSLab team Raj Prasanna, Marion Lara Tan, Julia Becker, PhD student Chandrakumar Chanthujan and Alicia Cui.

(original PLUM algorithm (Kodera et al., 2018), 0.03g PGA threshold, 1 station trigger – EXSIM Ground motion simulation (Boore, D. M. 2009) – https://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/2023p707798)