Earthquake early warning systems (EEWS) are real-time, advanced monitoring infrastructure systems which are experiencing a sudden improvement and a wide diffusion in many active seismic regions of the world during the last three years. They are able to provide an automatic notification of the potential damaging effects of an impending earthquake, through rapid telemetry and processing of data from dense instrument arrays deployed in the source region of the event of concern and/or surrounding the target infrastructure. An EEWS allows for mitigating actions to be taken before strong shaking and can significantly shorten the time necessary for emergency response and the recovery of critical facilities such as roads, hospitals and communication lines.
Scope of the course is to provide the background on Earthquake Early Warning principles, methods and data processing through the overview of the existing approaches and worldwide experiences, with a special focus on an integrated approach which combines the network-based and on-site methodologies. The last part of the session will be devoted to the analysis and open discussion of specific case studies for real and simulated earthquake scenarios.

The short course is part of the educational and training initiatives of the EU project REAKT (Strategies and tools for Real Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion).