A Threshold-Based Earthquake Early-Warning System for Offshore Events in Southern Iberia

Abstract

The south of the Iberian Peninsula is situated at the convergence of the Eurasian and African plates. This region experiences large earthquakes with long separation in time, the best known of which was the great 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, which occurred SW of San Vicente Cape (SW Iberian Peninsula). The high risk of damaging earthquakes has recently led Carranza et al. (Geophys. Res. Lett. 40, 2013) to investigate the feasibility of an EEWS in this region. Analysis of the geometry for the Iberian seismic networks and the San Vicente Cape area led the authors to conclude that a threshold-based approach, which would not require real-time location of the earthquake, might be the best option for an EEWS in SW Iberia. In this work we investigate this hypothesis and propose a new EEW approach that extends standard P-wave threshold-based single-station analysis to the whole network. The proposed method enables real-time estimation of the potential damage at stations that are triggered by P-waves and those which are not triggered, with the advantage of greater lead-times for release of alerts. Results of tests made with synthetic data mimicking the scenario of the great 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, and those conducted by applying the new approach to available recordings, indicate that an EEW estimation of the potential damage associated with an event in the San Vicente Cape area can be obtained for a very large part of the Iberian Peninsula.