INFORMATION-DEPENDENT LEAD-TIME MAPS FOR EARTHQUAKE EARLY WARNING IN THE CAMPANIA REGION

Feasibility of earthquake early warning systems (EEWS) depends on the possibility of immediately detecting the earthquake’s characteristics and on the ability to design applications for real-time seismic risk mitigation. Rapid estimation of event’s features (as magnitude and location) is the focus of real-time seismology; the second issue requires particular attention of engineers. Among the information needed to design EEW engineering applications (and to evaluate the effectiveness of EEWS) there is the estimation of the available time to perform security actions before the arrival of the more energetic seismic phase at the site of interest; this interval is termed lead-time. The study presented herein examines the distributions of the available lead-time in the Campania (southern Italy) region. The study considers events occurring in the area covered by the ISNet (Irpinia Seismic Network) infrastructure and assumes a spatially-uniform distribution for the hypocenters. Under these hypotheses the minimum, maximum and average lead-times were computed. Also the uncertainties associated to the information provided by the ISNet are considered in order to evaluate the lead-time; in fact, there is a trade-off between the amount of warning time and the level of information available to predict the peak ground shaking. Results of the analyses, presented in form of maps, confirm that evacuation of building is hardly possible in the region, although the available warning time seems to be sufficient to activate personal and/or automated security measures