Development of Earthquake Event Detection Technique Based on STA/LTA Algorithm for Seismic Alert System

Abstract

Among natural disasters, earthquake is the most common calamity which result in a wide spectrum of destruction, loses of property and human life. In order to mitigate the damage impact, there is an urgent need to realize a technological solution for vital installations i.e. Seismic alert system (SAS). It is a solution to avert colossal loss as earthquake forecasting is not yet possible and is being devised for regional notification for a possible mitigation while it is in active mode. For designing SAS, a network of seismic sensing node (SSN) is to be configured to detect the seismic activity in the region of interest. SSN discriminates between local noise and seismic event in real time using inbuilt event detection technique. The true seismic event is declared on satisfying the field parameters programmed by the user i.e. short and long duration window, threshold ratio, stability factor, de-threshold ratio, number of threshold channels, sampling rate, pre-event and post-event duration, number of channel and packet size duration. This paper illustrates the design aspects related to the event detection technique incorporated in the seismic node of the alert system and configured around the seismic sensors, 24-bit high resolution digitizers, GPS modules, etc. The results are validated by varying the different field parameters on recorded signal.