IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO.

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Wavelet-Based Rapid Estimation of Earthquake Magnitude Oriented to Early Warning

G. Hloupis and F. Vallianatos
AbstractThe main goal of an earthquake early warning system (EEWS) is to estimate the magnitude of an underway rupture from the rst few seconds in order to allow hazard assessment and mitigation before destructive events occur. This letter investigates the application of a wavelet-based algorithm for local magnitude estimation in the South Aegean Sea (focusing on Crete Island) which is covered by a sparse seismological network. A relation between the rst few seconds of the rst-arriving energy at the surface, the P wave, and the local magnitude of the earthquake has been developed for the area of interest. Results show that the errors produced by the proposed method present less scattering than relevant magnitude rapid estimation methods. It is the rst time that such a method is applied in a sparse seismological network since all the previous studies took place in high-density networks. This fact expands the applicability of EEWS and also provides an alternative magnitude estimator for the currently developed EEWS. Index TermsEarly warning systems, earthquake magnitude, wavelets.

I. I NTRODUCTION INCE the complexity involved in earthquake process does not allow the use of a practical earthquake prediction method, the only approach that can reduce the seismic hazard is by using systems that can generate alerts before the destructive S waves arrive to the area of interest. Such a system is called earthquake early warning system (EEWS), and its objective is to provide a few to tens of seconds of warning time for the oncoming ground motions, allowing for mitigation actions in short term. EEWS that estimates the severity of ground shaking a few seconds after its onset time is in operation in Japan [1], Taiwan [2][5], Mexico [6], and Italy [7]. The information produced by the aforementioned systems can be used by civil protection authorities in order to minimize the structural damage and the losses in an urban area as well as to provide real-time loss estimation for emergency response and recovery [8].

Manuscript received February 2, 2011; revised November 10, 2011 and January 20, 2012; accepted January 24, 2012. This work was supported in part by ARCHEMEDES III Program of the Ministry of Education of Greece and the European Union in the framework of the project entitled Interdisciplinary Multi-Scale Research of Earthquake Physics and Seismotectonics at the Front of the Hellenic Arc (IMPACT-ARC). G. Hloupis was with the Laboratory of Geophysics and Seismology, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, 73133 Chania, Greece. He is now with the Laboratory of Electric Characterization of Materials and Electronics Systems, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, 12210 Athens, Greece (e-mail: hloupis@teiath.gr). F. Vallianatos is with the Laboratory of Geophysics and Seismology, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, 73133 Chania, Greece. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LGRS.2012.2191932

A critical measure for EEWS is the magnitude of the earthquake. The rapid and accurate determination is the main goal for the successful operation of an EEWS. An earthquake generates two types of body waves: the P and S waves. The direct P waves have smaller amplitude and travel faster than S waves, which have lower velocity but higher amplitude and thus hold the destructive attributes [9]. As Kanamori [10] stated, P waves carry information while S waves carry energy. The traditional way of estimating a local magnitude (ML ) requires the whole seismogram [11]. This is the most accurate method but, from the seismic mitigation point, is useless since the magnitude can only be estimated after the arrival of the destructive part of the earthquake. During the last years, research has focused on whether an accurate earthquake magnitude can be rapidly estimated using only the rst few seconds of the P-wave recordings acquired by stations close to the epicenter. Several studies on EEWS [1], [11][17] used the predominant period of the rst few seconds of the P wave as the observable that correlates with ML . They found that the predominant period tends to increase with magnitude even where the rupture is not complete (large earthquakes) within the rst 34 s. Large magnitude events cause long-period initial ground motions, while small events cause short-period motions. In operative EEWSs, the predominant period is calculated in real time using the high-pass-ltered ground motion displacement and the velocity from vertical recordings. These two quantities lead to the predominant period estimator (PDE) which represents the the average period of the initial portion of the P wave. While PDE is an approximation of the P-wave pulsewidth (which increases with the magnitude), ML estimation is implemented by using regional specic empirical formulas which correlate the PDE with ML [14]. This hopeful estimator is not without shortcomings. As pointed out in [16] and [17], the PDE has signicant scattering mainly caused by its recursive calculation based on a spectral-domain relation. Seismic waves are composed of timefrequency-localized waveforms since they are traveling through complex media [18]. For this reason, it is better to choose a transform that can provide sufcient localization in both time and frequency domains. Wavelet transform (WT), which was originally introduced in seismology [19], [20], satises this requirement and is used to project the seismograms in the timefrequency domain. In this way, we are able to provide a nonspectral-domain-based magnitude estimator, improving in this way the uncertainty of PDE. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of elimination of the aforementioned scattering by using a magnitude estimator without performing calculations based on spectral-domain relations. Inspired by the idea introduced

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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013

in [17], we demonstrate the use of a redundant WT as a processing tool for earthquakes rapid magnitude estimation in a nondense regional seismological network. The proposed method, called wavelet magnitude estimation (WME), is used to derive a scaling relation between earthquakes magnitude and wavelet coefcients across several decomposition scales and is evaluated for South Aegean seismicity in the front of the Hellenic Arc. II. WT WT involves the decomposition of a signal function or vector into simpler xed building blocks at different scales and positions. A function is transformed from time domain to timefrequency domain by means of recursive application of two basis functions: the mother wavelet (which describes the high-frequency part of the examined function) and the father wavelet (which describes the low-frequency part). As time series are observed at regular intervals and are constituted by a nite-length vector of observations, the rest of this short presentation will relate to the discrete WT (DWT). DWT is implemented as a ltering operation: The mother wavelet corresponds to a high-pass lter (called wavelet lter), whereas the father wavelet corresponds to a low-pass lter (called scaling lter). They are related to each other through a quadrature mirror lter relationship. Wavelet lter coefcients must have three basic properties: 1) sum to zero; 2) unit energy; and 3) orthogonality to its even shifts. The scaling lter follows the same orthonormality properties of the wavelet lter, i.e., unit energy and orthogonality to even shifts, but instead of differencing consecutive blocks of observations, the scaling lter averages them. A detailed analysis regarding the wavelet and scaling lters and their properties can be found in [22]. The orthonormal DWT has two main drawbacks: the dyadic length requirement (sample size must be divisible by 2J ) and the fact that the wavelet and scaling coefcients are not shift invariant due to their sensitivity to circular shifts because of the decimation operation (i.e., DWT uses circular ltering, assuming that the examined time series is a portion of a periodic sequence, which is not always the case [21]). A nonorthogonal variant of DWT that is not suffering from the aforementioned drawbacks is the maximal overlap DWT (MODWT). For a time series X of length N , MODWT yields J + 1 vectors W1 , . . . , WJ (wavelet coefcients) and VJ (scaling coefcient), all of which have dimension N . Recovery of the original time series X can be easily performed via
J J T T Y J V J + Z j WJ = j=1 j=1

and sensitive to circular shifts. The choice of MODWT instead of DWT in the current study is dictated by their following differences. 1) The number of wavelet and scaling coefcients at every scale is the same as the number of observations. Thus, the MODWT coefcients may be considered as the result of a simple modication in the pyramid algorithm [22] used in computing DWT coefcients through not downsampling the output at each scale and inserting zeros between coefcients in the wavelet and scaling lters. 2) The details and smooth from MODWT are associated with zero-phase lters. Therefore, the coefcients from each level can be easily aligned with the original time series providing meaningful interpretations. 3) A shift in the signal does not change the pattern of WT coefcients; it provides increased resolution at coarser scales, unlike the classical DWT which has fewer coefcients at coarser scales. MODWT has a number of coefcients equal to the sample size at each scale and thus is oversampled at coarse scales. MODWT is a highly redundant transform since it needs O(N log2 N ) multiplications instead of O(N ) needed by DWT for transforming a times series of length N . Therefore, it presents higher computational price but, in comparison with the widely used FFT algorithm, presents the same computational burden; hence, when it is implemented in todays powerful microprocessor systems, it is quite acceptable [21]. III. DATA A NALYSIS AND M ETHOD S D ETAILS The area of interest is dened at the South Aegean Sea, focusing on the island of Crete. Since the island lies over the back arc of the Hellenic subduction zone, it is expected that strong and devastating earthquakes might occur. This is veried in the last decades for several observed ML > 6 earthquakes. The primary installed seismological network from the National Observatory of Athens had an interstation average distance around 220 km. Recent installations from GEOFON Group and Hellenic Seismological Network of Crete (HSNC) around Crete decrease the average distance to 60 km. This combined network cannot be characterized as dense; thus, it differs from previous relevant approaches which used wavelet-based magnitude estimation in dense seismological networks (California network[17] and Japan network[23]). For the current study, data from 325 earthquakes (separated in two data sets) were used. Data set A consisted of 184 earthquakes with recordings collected from ten seismological stations of HSNC (from July 30, 2003, to August 30, 2008) and regional recordings of ve GEOFON stations (from July 30, 1999, to August 30, 2008; publicly available at www.orfeusknmi.nl/data/webdc). Data set B consisted of 141 earthquakes (from September 1, 2008, to July 30, 2011) and will be used for the evaluation of the proposed method. The magnitude values that we used for comparison are the local magnitude computed by the EuropeanMediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSCwww.emsc-csem.org) referenced hereafter as ML,EMSC . It is important to clarify that the used earthquakes have ML,EMSC 3.8, and their depths were up to 40 km. For

X=

DJ + SJ

(1)

T T where Zj and YJ are N N matrices that dene the MODWT. Vectors Wj are obtained by ltering X with wavelet and scaling lters. Equation (1) also denes a MODWT-based multiresolution analysis of X in terms of Dj (wavelet details of level j) and SJ (wavelet smooth of level J). In seismological signal processing, we have to deal with signals without a predened length (the duration of an earthquake is not xed, so dyadic length cannot always be satised)

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Fig. 1. (Dashed square) Location of the study area (top left map) in the Mediterranean basin and (bottom left) inside the Greek territory. (Stars) Earthquakes epicenters for data set A and seismological stations (circles: HSNC; square: GEOFON) are shown in the right map.

each earthquake, we utilized seismograms that are recorded from stations up to 135 km away from the epicenter. This value was selected since this is more than twice the average interstation distance and is between the values of relevant studies [9], [17]. A graphical representation of the aforementioned is shown in Fig. 1. The WME data processing scheme involves denoising, wavelet transformation, and scale-by-scale coefcient selection of vertical component from each seismogram. A 12-s data portion around the indicated onset time (from EMSC bulletin; publicly available at http://www.emsccsem.org/Earthquake/index.php) was initially selected for denoising. Denoise is performed using an appropriate (according to the signal-to-noise ratio) wavelet denoising scheme [24], [25]. The length of 12 s was selected experimentally in order to have the minimum acceptable data portion of preseismic noise which is required for a successful application of denoising methods [24]. The goal of the proposed method is to extract from the wavelet-transformed denoised vertical components an estimation of the earthquakes magnitude. After a trial-and-error procedure, we conclude to keep the rst signicant wavelet coefcient at each scale for 5-s time window (t = 0 denotes the P-wave arrival). For each distinct magnitude, the average of the absolute values of wavelet coefcients is calculated over all stations that satisfy the epicenter and depth criteria. From these averages, the best-t regression line is derived. The number of vertical component seismograms that satisfy the epicenter and depth criteria at data set A was 862. Results are presented for scales 47 (scales 13 are not presented since they did not provide any signicant correlation). Unlike previous studies [17] and [23], which used the lifting approach of WT, here, we apply the MODWT. The use of a redundant WT is dictated in order to avoid boundary effects; a fact that previous authors detected but did not take into account. The MODWT applied using the least-asymmetric-8 basis [21] running over seven scales instead of nine (since the higher magnitude event in our data set was 6.7). IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION A typical set of earthquakes recorded from the aforementioned stations is shown in Fig. 2. Transforming the aforementioned seismograms using MODWT with the settings

Fig. 2. Vertical component seismograms from two earthquakes. (a) ML,EMSC = 5.3, 9-km depth, June 12, 200800:20:42.3 UTC, 34.92 N26.24 E, and an epicentral distance of 11 km from the nearest recording station. (b) ML,EMSC = 5.0, 32-km depth, August 13, 200610:35:10.5 UTC, 34.42 N26.68 E, and an epicentral distance of 111 km from the nearest recording station.

Fig. 3. MODWT of Fig. 2(a) seismogram. The vertical arrow indicates the maximum amplitude coefcient at corresponding scale.

Fig. 4. MODWT of Fig. 2(b) seismogram. The vertical arrow indicates the maximum amplitude coefcient at corresponding scale.

mentioned earlier produces the wavelet coefcients shown in Figs. 3 and 4. An obvious result that can be extracted from Figs. 3 and 4 is that the maximum amplitude coefcients are presented at higher scales (which correspond to lower frequencies) for stronger earthquakes. This is expected since a strong earthquake is the result of a slip over a large patch of fault and thus radiates lower frequency energy [9]. In

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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013

Fig. 5. Correlation of wavelet amplitudes at scales (top left) 4, (top right) 5, (bottom left) 6, and (bottom right) 7 with earthquake magnitude. Results for individual seismograms are shown as gray dots (some share the same amplitude values), the 25th and 75th percentile as thin black dashes, and the averages at every distinct magnitude as black squares. The thick line is the least squares best-t line to the average values, and the two dashed lines show the range of one standard deviation. The reported magnitudes were extracted from the EMSC catalog (ML,EMSC ).

Fig. 6. PDE estimates for events in data set A. Results for individual seismograms are shown as gray dots (some share the same PDE values), the 25th and 75th percentile as thin black dashes, and the averages at every distinct magnitude as black diamonds. The thick line is the least squares best-t line to the average values, and the two dashed lines show the range of one standard deviation. The reported magnitudes were extracted from the EMSC catalog (ML,EMSC ).

addition, the maximum amplitude coefcient often occurs later at lower scales (higher frequencies). This can be fully explained for strong earthquakes only since they radiate large bursts of energy (represented in higher frequencies) in later times [23]. Furthermore, it is observed that there is an increasing tendency of coefcients amplitude as the scale is increasing. All these observations agree with the conclusions in previous PDE studies where it is observed that stronger earthquakes present lower predominant frequencies in the rst few seconds. The results from Fig. 5 show that there are signicant correlations between station-averaged wavelet coefcients at the last two scales (6 and 7). The correlation coefcients are R6 = 0.921 for scale 6 and R7 = 0.941 for scale 7. Better magnitude estimation was achieved using the amplitude of wavelet coefcients (WCA) at scale 7. Thus, the equation characterizing the magnitude prediction using wavelet coefcients for South Aegean is MWME = 1.249 log W CA7 0.338. (2)

Fig. 7. Comparison of magnitude prediction errors between (open circles) WME and (solid diamonds) PDE. The solid line presents the points of no error. The range of one standard deviation for WME is dened by two dotted lines, whereas that for PDE is dened by the two dashed lines. The reported magnitudes were extracted from the EMSC catalog (ML,EMSC ).

In order to compare the WME with PDE for the South Aegean seismological network, analysis using the latter estimator was performed using data set A. Results are shown in Fig. 6. The calculated regression is MPDE = 3.17 log(P DE) + 5.7M . The MWME and MPDE equations were applied to data set B in order to estimate the errors between each estimator and reported magnitudes. Results are shown in Fig. 7, where PDE presents bigger scattering in comparison with WME. This is not an unexpected event based on the observation done in [13], where it is stated that PDE performs better when a wide magnitude range is selected. In their case, it was from 3.0 to 8.1 local magnitude scales. Since our data set ranges from 3.8 to 6.9, it is expected that PDE will present bigger scattering. This is also observed in [26], which used earthquakes with a narrow local

magnitude range, from 6.0 to 7.1, as well as in [5] and [27]. Our results indicate that the better performance of WME against PDE can lead to consecutive clause that it is a more suitable estimator for sparse seismological networks. Further analysis regarding local site effects and interstation distance could reveal limitations for both estimators and conclude to generalized assumptions. The importance of the current study lies on two facts: First, wavelet-based methods are more suitable in order to overcome the intrinsic nonlinear behavior of PDE (as suggested in [16]), and second, it is the rst time that a rapid magnitude estimation method is applied in a moderate density seismological network since all PDE relevant studies took place in highdensity networks. The latter expands the applicability of EEWS in networks that cannot meet the strict criteria of high density and also provide an alternative or even accessional magnitude estimator for the currently deployed EEWS.

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V. C ONCLUSION In this letter, we have adopted the MODWT to investigate if the magnitude of a shallow (depth of < 35 km) earthquake can be estimated rapidly. More specically, it has been shown that is possible to use the wavelet coefcients from specic scales in order to provide a quick estimation of the earthquakes magnitude oriented for EEWS. The maximum amplitude of the wavelet coefcients at higher scales of WT (here, 6 and 7) seems to correlate satisfactorily with the local reported magnitude. This observation led us to the calculation of an empirical relation which associates the WCA at the last scale with the local reported magnitude. Compared with PDE, WME shows better performance for the South Aegean area regarding its application to an EEWS. This is an expected result since PDE is a nonlinear function of spectral amplitude and frequency which overweighs higher amplitudes and frequencies [16]. In addition, as a time-dependent estimator which is calculated by recursive relation, it is highly inuenced by phase and amplitude spectrum. On the other hand, WME presents less scattering to results, providing in this way the opportunity to sparse seismological networks to deploy a near-real-time magnitude estimator which is among the most important parameters of EEWS. Real-time operation of WME in a seismic operative network can be achieved by using the atrous algorithm as modied by Mallat [28]. In such an implementation, MODWT will be performed by a lter bank (an array of high- and low-pass lters). The coefcients extracted from lters that correspond to scale 7 will be associated with local magnitude using (2). Future work on WME will focus on its accuracy improvement by using a recursive calculation of (2) after a predened number of events. R EFERENCES
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