Innovation in Earthquake Early Warning System: A Case Study of EQ Guard

Abstract

Global frequency of disasters is following an upward trend. While the frequency of significant earthquake linked disasters is much less compared to hydrometeorological disasters, the causalities attributed to earthquakes considerably surpass those attributed to any other disasters. This makes earthquakes a low-frequency but high-impact hazard. Further, unlike other natural hazard warning mechanism, earthquake warning has a window of a few seconds to a minute, hence catching us mostly unaware and leading to more injuries and causalities. With the advancement in the field of earthquake research, and science and technology, many countries including Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and USA boast of having an earthquake warning system. Although it is not possible to reliably predict earthquakes, but the existing technologies create a window for decisive action by analyzing the P-wave, which provides advance information of the estimated seismic intensities and arrival time of strong tremors prior to their actual arrival. Ranging from a few seconds to a minute in hand, such a warning allows to take necessary safety measures including individual safety, evacuation, shutting down of critical/hazardous processes to mitigate impacts, stopping elevators, trains, initiating response, etc. This study discusses the innovation and advancement in earthquake early warning (EEW) systems in Japan. It explores the functioning of the existing product, namely, Earthquake Guard (EQG-III) developed by Challenge Co. Ltd., Japan which is being used for earthquake early warning.