Toward a Loss-Driven Earthquake Early Warning and Rapid Response System for Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia)

Abstract

Over the last decade, increasing attention has been paid by the international community to the topic of earthquake early warning (EEW) systems, as a viable solution to protect specific hazard‐prone targets (major cities or critical infrastructure) against harmful seismic events. The aim of the EEW system is to detect the occurrence of an earthquake and to determine its relevant characteristics (such as location and magnitude) early enough to predict the ground shaking at the target site before the S ‐wave arrival. Possible emergency protocols that can be activated upon event detection range from slowing down or stopping rail traffic (Nakamura, 2004; Horiuchi et al. , 2005; Espinosa‐Aranda et al. , 2011), safely shutting down or activating protective measure of critical infrastructures such as nuclear power plants (Saita et al. , 2008), to broadcasting alerts to the general public (Wenzel and Lungu, 2000; Lee and Espinosa‐Aranda, 2002; Allen and Kanamori, 2003; Horiuchi et al. , 2005; Wu et al. , 2007). Only few systems have been actually implemented and are currently operational. Examples of regional applications are the systems operating in California, Japan, and Taiwan, whereas targeted systems have been developed, for instance, in Mexico, Irpinia (Italy), and Vrancea (Romania). We refer the interested readers to the comprehensive references in Wenzel and Zschau (2014). Despite the potential benefits of EEW system, several factors so far hindered their widespread application especially in economically developing countries. When the distance between the seismic sources and the exposed target is too short for instance, or there is no technological infrastructure supporting real‐time, automatic operations, the information provided by the EEW system cannot be exploited for pre‐event actions. In these cases, which occur remarkably often in many seismic regions, the level of ground shaking predicted by the system can still be used as input …