Application of the "PRESTo" Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) and Alert Management System in North-Eastern Italy, Slovenia and Austria: experience with the CE3R Network

Aiming at the seismic risk mitigation in the eastern sector of the Alps, since 2002 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria) are collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time. The data exchange has proved to be effective and very useful in case of seismic events at the borders between Italy, Austria and Slovenia, where the poor coverage of individual national seismic networks precluded a precise earthquake location, while the usage of common data from the integrated networks improves significantly the overall capability of real time event detection and rapid characterization in this area. Recently, in order to extend the seismic monitoring in North-eastern Italy, Slovenia and Southern Austria towards earthquake early warning applications, OGS, ARSO and ZAMG teamed with the RISSCLab group (http://www.rissclab.unina.it/) of the Department of Physics at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. As shown by Allen et al. (2009) and Hoshiba (2013), when accompanied by appropriate training and preparedness of the population, Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS) are effective and viable tools for the real-time seismic risk mitigation in metropolitan areas. The collaboration focuses on massive testing on OGS, ARSO and ZAMG data of the EEW platform PRESTo (Probabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem) developed by RISSC-Lab (http://www.prestoews.org/). PRESTo is a stand-alone software system that processes live accelerometric streams from the stations of a seismic network to promptly provide probabilistic and evolutionary estimates of location and magnitude of detected earthquakes while they are occurring, as well as shaking prediction at the regional scale (Satriano et al., 2010). In order to analyse its performance in different seismic hazard context and seismic networks of varying extension, PRESTo is currently operating in several seismological centres (e.g., the ISNet network in southern Apennines; KIGAM in South-Korea; Kandilli in Istanbul; NIEP in Romania). Since the beginning of 2014 PRESTo is also running on OGS, ARSO and ZAMG data, by collecting and analysing in real-time the data streams from 20 stations (Fig. 1). In the following, we first briefly summarize the characteristics of EEWS and PRESTo. Then, we present the CE3RN project and we describe the set-up of PRESTo in the transnational area including North-East Italy, Slovenia and Austria. Therefore, we present the results of a test carried out by playing-back the waveforms of the strong motion data of the Mw 6.5, 1976 Friuli Earthquake. Finally, we report on the performance of the EEW system during this preliminary testing phase.