The new Algerian Digital Seismic Network (ADSN): towards an earthquake early-warning system

Seismic monitoring in Algeria has seen great changes since the Boumerdes earthquake of 21 May 2003. Indeed, the installation of a new digital seismic network has resulted in a significant upgrade of the previous analog telemetry network. During the last four years, the number of stations in operation has increased substantially from 25 to 69, and 20 of these are broadband, 2 are very broadband, 47 are short period. 21 are equipped with accelerometers. They are all managed by Antelope software from Kinemetrics (US Cie), and they are all connected in real time and use various modes of transmission (e.g., satellite, internet, mobile phone). The spatial repartition of the stations now cover most of northern Algeria. In addition, 70 GPS stations have recently been added to this seismological network, most of them collocated with the seismological stations. Since the installation of the network, the records of local or distant events have improved significantly. The automatic processing of the data in a few minutes allows alert messages to be distributed to Civil Defense and other national authorities to react promptly to any emergency. The current strategy is to improve the data quality, to increase the density of the network by adding about 50 new stations, to reduce the processing time, and to reduce the time needed to send out an alert message. The result should be greatly improved network performance, which will lead to an effective early-warning system.

The Earth’s Free Spherical Oscillations of the Great Japan Earthquake

An M9.0 earthquake struck Japan on March 11, 2011 and the strong earthquake made continuous oscillation of the Earth. We first studied the Earth’s free oscillations using observations of VHZ channel of China Digital Seismic Network (CDSN). Since the frequency response of seismograph in CDSN suppresses the information of low frequency signal, we do not need to remove the solid tide in our data processing. We extracted 72 clear spherical modes of (0S0,0S2to0S72) of the Earth’s free oscillation and 21 harmonic modes and they are consistent and nearly same with the frequencies of the modes of Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM). Spectral splitting phenomenon is observed obviously in0S2,0S3,0S4and1S2free oscillation modes.

The Earth’s Free Spherical Oscillations of the Chile Earthquake

An M8.8 earthquake struck Chile on February 27, 2010 and the strong earthquake made continuous oscillation of the Earth. We studied the Earth’s free oscillations using observations of VHZ channel of China Digital Seismic Network (CDSN). Since the frequency response of seismograph in CDSN suppresses the information of low frequency signal, we do not need to remove the solid tide in our data processing. We extracted 76 clear spherical modes of (0S0, 0S2 to 0S76) of the Earth’s free oscillation and 78 harmonic modes and they are consistent and nearly same with the frequencies of the modes of Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM). Spectral splitting phenomenon is observed obviously in 0S2, 0S3, 0S4 and 1S2 free oscillation modes.

Variability of ground motions in southern California—data from the 1995 to 1996 Ridgecrest sequence

Seismograms from the 1995 to 1996 Ridgecrest, California, earthquake sequence, recorded by the TriNet digital seismic network, provide high-quality waveforms from sites throughout southern California, including sites in markedly heterogeneous areas like the Los Angeles area sedimentary basins. Synthetic seismograms calculated by the reflectivity method with various 1D models are used as a baseline to measure the variability of amplitudes throughout southern California. Regardless of the model used, there is greater variability in the amplitudes from basin site records than from rock site records. Rock, soil, and basin sites are all rather insensitive to radiation pattern nodes at the three frequency bands investigated: 0.1 to 0.2 Hz, 0.2 to 0.4 Hz, and 0.4 to 0.8 Hz. This complicates the analysis because the nodes create singularity points in the distribution of ratios of observed and synthetic amplitudes. When stations near nodal planes are removed, the surface waves observed at most rock sites have peak amplitudes within a factor of 2 of synthetic waveform amplitudes. Peak amplitude of the surface waves observed at the soil and basin stations are more variable, with the bulk of the distribution of data/synthetic amplitude ratios less than 3 and a few outliers greater than 5. These outliers occur at the higher frequency bands. Soil and basin sites are also more often larger than the synthetics (higher median values). Most outliers can be explained by applying a water level of 50% to the radiation pattern. This reduces the scatter in the distributions to about the same extent as removing data within 10° of nodes. Thus, most of the outliers are sites that are insensitive to the nodes, not sites that are larger than the overall data distribution.