Accuracy and Uncertainty Analysis of Selected Methodological Approaches to Earthquake Early Warning in Europe

Abstract

Abstract Earthquake early warning (EEW) is becoming an increasingly attractive real-time strategy for mitigating the threats posed by potentially devastating incoming seismic events. As efforts accelerate to develop practical EEW-based solutions for earthquake-prone countries in Europe, it is important to understand and quantify the level of performance that can be achieved by the underlying seismological algorithms. We conduct a conceptual study on EEW performance in Europe, which explicitly focuses on the accuracy and associated uncertainties of selected methodological approaches. Twenty-three events from four diverse European testbeds are used to compare the quality of EEW predictions produced by the Virtual Seismologist and PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem algorithms. We first examine the location and magnitude estimates of the algorithms, accounting for both bias and uncertainty in the resulting predictions. We then investigate the ground-shaking prediction capabilities of the source-parameter estimates, using an error metric that can explicitly capture the propagation of uncertainties in these estimates. Our work highlights the importance of accounting for EEW parameter uncertainties, which are often neglected in studies of EEW performance. Our findings can be used to inform current and future implementations of EEW systems in Europe. In addition, the evaluation metrics presented in this work can be used to determine EEW accuracy in any worldwide setting.