ALBERT

Description: Nowadays, Tsunami Early Warning Systems (TEWS) issue the first alert between three and five minutes after the occurrence of a potentially tsunamigenic earthquake. For offshore earthquakes, for which a significant network azimuthal gap limits the accuracy of standard techniques for source location, this time is spent to obtain stable estimations of the event magnitude and depth. This large warning time affects the efficiency of TEWS for near-coastal large earthquakes. Recent developments in Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS) mitigates this issue. Here, we consider a P-wave, shaking-forecast based EEW method (Zollo et al., 2023) to provide fast and accurate estimations of event location and magnitude along with the Potential Damage Zone (PDZ). As a first test of a combined E- and T- EWS, we applied the method by playing-back the simulated records of two events of Mw 6 and 7 in the Messina strait, with source characteristics that mimic the 1908 Messina earthquake. The events are simulated at the INGV and RAN seismic stations along the Sicily and Calabria coasts. We estimated stable and accurate hypocenter locations and magnitude determinations in 20-25 seconds for both events. The shape of the PDZ obtained after 30 s from the earthquake origin well reproduces the geometry of the rupture surface. These first results show that combining EEWS and TEWS can speed up the tsunami forecasting, thus increasing the lead-time available for actions to protect the exposed population.