A regional Earthquake Early Warning System: PRESTo@CE3RN

With the aim of monitoring the seismic activity in the eastern sector of the Alps, since 2001 OGS (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, Bragato et al., 2011) in Udine (Italy), the Agencija Republike Slovenije za Okolje (ARSO) in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG) in Vienna (Austria), and the University of Trieste (UniTS) have been collecting, analyzing, archiving and exchanging seismic data in real time. The data exchange has proven to be effective and very useful in the 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. 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. Furthermore, in 2014, OGS, ARSO, ZAMG and UniTS signed a memorandum of understanding naming the cooperative network as the Central and Eastern European Earthquake Research Network (CE3RN) (Bragato et al., 2014). 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 up with the RISSC-Lab group (http://www.rissclab.unina.it/) of the Department of Physics at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. An Earthquake Early Warning System (EEWS) is a real-time system integrating seismic networks and software capable of performing real-time data telemetry and analysis in order to issue alert messages within seconds from the origin of an earthquake and before the destructive S-waves generated by the event reach the users. When accompanied by appropriate training and preparedness of the population, an EEWS is an effective and viable tool for reducing the exposure of a population to seismic risk (Satriano et al., 2008 and 2010b). The collaboration among OGS, ARSO, ZAMG and RISSC-LAB focuses on testing the EEW platform PRESTo (PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem: http://www.prestoews.org/) in north-eastern Italy, Slovenia and Austria at the network CE3RN, and represents the first attempt worldwide of implementing a trans-national EEWs. PRESTo is a standalone software system that processes live accelerometric streams from 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., 2010a). Since 2014 PRESTo has run on OGS, ARSO and ZAMG data, by collecting and analysing in real time the data streams from 20 stations (Fig. 1, Picozzi et al., 2014a, 2014b and 2015). In the following, first we briefly present the CE3RN project and we summarise the characteristics of EEWS and PRESTo, then we report on the performance of the EEW system during this first testing phase.