Developments in EEW testing: Including large magnitude events in the new test suite

Deborah E. Smith, Jeff McGuire, Andrew Good, Stephen Guiwits, Colin O'Rourke, & Angela I. Chung

Published August 15, 2019, SCEC Contribution #9885, 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #094

Earthquake early warning algorithms must undergo rigorous real-time and offline testing before being accepted into the ShakeAlert production system. The ShakeAlert Testing and Certification platform attempts to simulate how the production system will perform by deploying the proposed algorithms, configurations, earthworm rings/modules, and ActiveMQ messaging on separate, nearly identical hardware. For real-time testing, the test servers are fed the same West Coast input waveform data as the production servers, and the algorithms’ performance is compared between the test and existing production systems after a minimum of two weeks. For offline testing, four simultaneous instances of the algorithms are run on one machine with a historic test suite of earthworm tankplayer files (format used for replaying data into an earthworm ring with realistic timing). These tankplayer files include data from West Coast earthquakes (M4.1 to M7.2), teleseisms, regional events, and problematic data sets (re-centering channels, calibrations, noisy data, etc.).

We have made significant progress in developing a testsuite v.2.0, for the ShakeAlert EEW testing platform. In particular, this testsuite v.2.0 will include tests of algorithm performance for many more large magnitude (M6+) events that were recorded by dense strong-motion networks. We are augmenting the large magnitude suite of earthquakes by showing results for numerous crustal and subduction zone Japanese events, the M7.1 Anchorage event, the M6.7 Northridge event, the M6.4 and M7.1 Ridgecrest events, and possibly other events.

Key Words
earthquake early warning, ground motions, testing

Citation
Smith, D. E., McGuire, J., Good, A., Guiwits, S., O'Rourke, C., & Chung, A. I. (2019, 08). Developments in EEW testing: Including large magnitude events in the new test suite. Poster Presentation at 2019 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Seismology