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A comparison of τ c and τ p max for magnitude estimation in earthquake early warning
Author(s) -
Shieh JangTian,
Wu YihMin,
Allen Richard M.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2008gl035611
Subject(s) - magnitude (astronomy) , standard deviation , mathematics , moment magnitude scale , earthquake magnitude , statistics , filter (signal processing) , physics , geodesy , geology , geometry , computer science , astronomy , scaling , computer vision
We determined the τ c and τ p max parameters from the K‐NET strong motion records of 16 earthquakes in Japan with moment magnitude (M w ) ranging from 6.0 to 8.3. A 0.075 Hz high‐pass Butterworth filter was applied for determination of τ c based on our previous studies. It was found that different pole selections of the Butterworth filter lead to different uncertainty in magnitude determination. Our results show that using two poles in the filters results in the best magnitude estimates, i.e., minimized the standard deviation in magnitude determination in comparison to M w using τ c . The τ p max parameters (Allen and Kanamori, 2003) were also determined with the same dataset using the Wurman et al. (2007) procedure. It was found that τ p max values obtained from this dataset, and using the Wurman procedure, had a larger uncertainty. However, when a 0.075 Hz high‐pass Butterworth filter with five poles was added, the uncertainty in τ p max ‐derived magnitude estimates decreased minimizing the standard deviation in magnitude determination using τ p max . This difference in the behavior of τ c and τ p max can be used to further reduce the uncertainty in rapid magnitude determination for earthquake early warning. When the magnitude estimations from τ c and τ p max of each event are averaged to provide a new magnitude estimate, the standard deviation in magnitude estimates is reduced further to 0.27 magnitude units.