Fast determination of earthquake magnitude and fault extent from real-time P-wave recordings

This work is aimed at the automatic and fast characterization of the extended earthquake source, through the progressive measurement of the P-wave displacement amplitude along the recorded seismograms. We propose a straightforward methodology to quickly characterize the earthquake magnitude and the expected length of the rupture, and to provide an approximate estimate of the average stress drop to be used for Earthquake EarlyWarning and rapid response purposes. We test the methodology over a wide distance and magnitude range using a massive Japan earthquake, accelerogram data set. Our estimates of moment magnitude, source duration/ length and stress drop are consistent with the ones obtained by using other techniques and analysing the whole seismic waveform. In particular, the retrieved source parameters follow a self-similar, constant stress-drop scaling (median value of stress drop = 0.71 MPa). For the M 9.0, 2011 Tohoku-Oki event, both magnitude and length are underestimated, due to limited, available P-wave time window (PTWs) and to the low-frequency cut-off of analysed data. We show that, in a simulated real-time mode, about 1-2 seconds would be required for the source parameter determination of M 4-5 events, 3-10 seconds for M 6-7 and 30-40 s for M 8-8.5. The proposed method can also provide a rapid evaluation of the average slip on the fault plane, which can be used as an additional discriminant for tsunami potential, associated to large magnitude earthquakes occurring offshore.