Seismology-based early identification of dam-formation landquake events

A first near real-time seismology-based landquake monitoring system

Hazards from gravity-driven instabilities on hillslope (termed ‘landquake’ in this study) are an important problem facing us today. Rapid detection of landquake events is crucial for hazard mitigation and emergency response. Based on the real-time broadband data in Taiwan, we have developed a near real-time landquake monitoring system, which is a fully automatic process based on waveform inversion that yields source information (e.g., location and mechanism) and identifies the landquake source by examining waveform fitness for different types of source mechanisms. This system has been successfully tested offline using seismic records during the passage of the 2009 Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan and has been in online operation during the typhoon season in 2015. In practice, certain levels of station coverage (station gap < 180°), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR ≥ 5.0), and a threshold of event size (volume >10⁶ m³ and area > 0.20 km²) are required to ensure good performance (fitness > 0.6 for successful source identification) of the system, which can be readily implemented in other places in the world with real-time seismic networks and high landquake activities.