Towards Global Earthquake Early Warning with the MyShake Smartphone Seismic Network Part 2 -- Understanding MyShake performance around the world

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of the MyShake global smartphone seismic network for earthquake early warning through simulations across various regions, highlighting its strengths and limitations based on population density and tectonic setting.

Contribution

It provides the first performance assessment of MyShake's EEW system worldwide using simulations, considering different network configurations and population densities.

Findings

High performance in densely populated, onshore, upper crustal earthquakes M<7.0

Alerts generated within 4-6 seconds after earthquake origin in optimal conditions

System remains effective with as low as 0.01% population participation in high-density areas

Abstract

The MyShake project aims to build a global smartphone seismic network to facilitate large-scale earthquake early warning and other applications by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing. The MyShake mobile application first detects earthquake shaking on a single phone. The earthquake is then confirmed on the MyShake servers using a "network detection" algorithm that is activated by multiple single-phone detections. In part two of this two paper series, we report the first order performance of MyShake's Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) capability in various selected locations around the world. Due to the present sparseness of the MyShake network in most parts of the world, we use our simulation platform to understand and evaluate the system's performance in various tectonic settings. We assume that 0.1% of the population has the MyShake mobile application installed on their smartphone, and use historical earthquakes from the last 20 years to simulate triggering scenarios with different network configurations in various regions. Then, we run the detection algorithm with these simulated triggers to understand the performance of the system. The system performs best in regions featuring high population densities and onshore, upper crustal earthquakes M<7.0. In these cases, alerts can be generated ~4-6 sec after the origin time, magnitude errors are within ~0.5 magnitude units, and epicenters are typically within 10 km of true locations. When the events are offshore or in sparsely populated regions, the alerts are slower and the uncertainties in magnitude and location increase. Furthermore, even with 0.01% of the population as the MyShake users, in regions of high population density, the system still performs well for earthquakes larger than M5.5. For details of the simulation platform and the network detection algorithm, please see part one of this two paper series.