ShakeAlert v. 2.0 Testing and Certification

Deborah E. Smith, Monica D. Kohler, Jennifer R. Andrews, Angela I. Chung, Renate Hartog, Ivan Henson, Douglas D. Given, & Stephen Guiwits

Published August 15, 2018, SCEC Contribution #8834, 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #053

Earthquake early warning algorithms have to undergo rigorous real-time and offline testing before being accepted into the ShakeAlert production system. In anticipation of the scheduled ShakeAlert v. 2.0 phase 1 rollout in late 2018, multiple algorithms and associated configurations were tested using the ShakeAlert Testing and Certification platform procedure. The testing system attempts to simulate how the production system will perform by deploying the proposed algorithms, configurations, earthworm rings/modules, and ActiveMQ messaging on separate, nearly identical hardware. For the real-time testing, the test servers are fed the same West Coast input waveform data, and the algorithms’ performance is compared between the test and existing production systems after a minimum of two weeks. For the offline testing, four simultaneous instances of the algorithms are run on one machine with a historic test suite of earthworm tankplayer files (format used for replaying data into an earthworm ring with realistic timing). These tankplayer files include data from West Coast earthquakes (M4.1 to M7.2), teleseisms, regional events, and problematic data sets (recenterings, calibrations, noisy data, etc.). The algorithms included in the ShakeAlert v 2.0 test are: 1) EPIC (Earthquake Point-source Integrated Code), 2) FinDer (Finite Fault Detector), 3) EqInfo2GM (Earthquake Information to Ground Motion), 4) SA (Solution Aggregator), and 5) DM (Decision Module).

Citation
Smith, D. E., Kohler, M. D., Andrews, J. R., Chung, A. I., Hartog, R., Henson, I., Given, D. D., & Guiwits, S. (2018, 08). ShakeAlert v. 2.0 Testing and Certification. Poster Presentation at 2018 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Earthquake Forecasting and Predictability (EFP)