Feasibility study of earthquake early warning in Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In this study, we examine the scientific feasibility of an Earthquake Early Warning System in Tehran, Iran, by the integration of the Tehran Disaster Mitigation and Management Organization (TDMMO) accelerometric network and the PRobabilistic and Evolutionary early warning SysTem (PRESTo). To evaluate the performance of the TDMMO-PRESTo system in providing the reliable estimations of earthquake parameters and the available lead-times for The Metropolis of Tehran, two different approaches were analyzed in this work. The first approach was assessed by applying the PRESTo algorithms on waveforms from 11 moderate instrumental earthquakes that occurred in the vicinity of Tehran during the period 2009–2020. Moreover, we conducted a simulation analysis using synthetic waveforms of 10 large historical earthquakes that occurred in the vicinity of Tehran. We demonstrated that the six worst-case earthquake scenarios can be considered for The Metropolis of Tehran, which are mostly related to the historical and instrumental events that occurred in the southern, eastern, and western parts of Tehran. Our results indicate that the TDMMO-PRESTo system could provide reliable and sufficient lead-times of about 1 to 15s and maximum lead-times of about 20s for civil protection purposes in The Metropolis of Tehran.