• Journal of the Korean Society of Hazard Mitigation
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.73-79
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• 2008

Economic growth, industrialization and urbanization have made society more vulnerable than ever to seismic hazard in Korea. Although Korea has not experienced severe damage due to earthquakes during the last few decades, there is little doubt of the potential for large earthquakes in Korea as documented in the historical literature. As we see no immediate promise of short-term earthquake prediction with current science and technology, earthquake early warning systems attract more and more attention as a practical measure to mitigate damage from earthquakes. Earthquake early warning systems provide a few seconds to tens of seconds of warning time before the onset of strong ground shaking. To achieve rapid earthquake location, we propose to take full advantage of information from existing seismic networks; by using P wave arrival times at two nearest stations from the earthquake hypocenter and also information that P waves have not yet arrived at other stations. Ten earthquakes in the Korean peninsula and its vicinity are selected for the feasibility study. We observed that location results are not reliable when earthquakes occur outside of the seismic network. Earthquakes inside the seismic network, however, can be located very rapidly for the purpose of earthquake early warning. Seoul metropolitan area may secure $10{\sim}50$ seconds of warning time before any strong shaking starts for certain events. Carefully orchestrated actions during the given warning time should be able to reduce hazard and mitigate damages due to potentially disastrous earthquakes.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.71-81
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• 2021

This paper presents a real-time, false-pick filter based on deep learning to reduce false alarms of an onsite Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system. Most onsite EEW systems use P-wave to predict S-wave. Therefore, it is essential to properly distinguish P-waves from noises or other seismic phases to avoid false alarms. To reduce false-picks causing false alarms, this study made the EEWNet Part 1 'False-Pick Filter' model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Specifically, it modified the Pick_FP (Lomax et al.) to generate input data such as the amplitude, velocity, and displacement of three components from 2 seconds ahead and 2 seconds after the P-wave arrival following one-second time steps. This model extracts log-mel power spectrum features from this input data, then classifies P-waves and others using these features. The dataset consisted of 3,189,583 samples: 81,394 samples from event data (727 events in the Korean Peninsula, 103 teleseismic events, and 1,734 events in Taiwan) and 3,108,189 samples from continuous data (recorded by seismic stations in South Korea for 27 months from 2018 to 2020). This model was trained with 1,826,357 samples through balancing, then tested on continuous data samples of the year 2019, filtering more than 99% of strong false-picks that could trigger false alarms. This model was developed as a module for USGS Earthworm and is written in C language to operate with minimal computing resources.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.107-122
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• 2019

As one of the most important parameters in structural health monitoring, structural frequency has many advantages, such as convenient to be measured, high precision, and insensitive to noise. In addition, frequency-change-ratio based method had been validated to have the ability to identify the damage occurrence and location. However, building a precise enough finite elemental model (FEM) for the test structure is still a huge challenge for this frequency-change-ratio based damage detection technique. In order to overcome this disadvantage and extend the application for frequencies in structural health monitoring area, a novel method was developed in this paper by combining the cross-model cross-mode (CMCM) model updating algorithm with the frequency-change-ratio based method. At first, assuming the physical parameters, including the element mass and stiffness, of the test structure had been known with a certain value, then an initial to-be-updated model with these assumed parameters was constructed according to the typical mass and stiffness distribution characteristic of shear buildings. After that, this to-be-updated model was updated using CMCM algorithm by combining with the measured frequencies of the actual structure when no damage was introduced. Thus, this updated model was regarded as a representation of the FEM model of actual structure, because their modal information were almost the same. Finally, based on this updated model, the frequency-change-ratio based method can be further proceed to realize the damage detection and localization. In order to verify the effectiveness of the developed method, a four-level shear building was numerically simulated and two actual shear structures, including a three-level shear model and an eight-story frame, were experimentally test in laboratory, and all the test results demonstrate that the developed method can identify the structural damage occurrence and location effectively, even only very limited modal frequencies of the test structure were provided.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.439-448
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• 2018

Conventional Earthquake Early Warning System (EEWS) detects the propagated P-wave from epicenter which should be achieved within 5 seconds to provide seconds to minutes of warning, allowing people to prepare for protective actions. EEWS in Korea is currently capable of providing a warning within 50 seconds after the primary P-wave detection, however, it is well-known that earthquake warning systems operating around Korean National Parks (KNP) have limited capability to fully monitor earthquake events. This study, therefore, presents a strategy to quantify the potential vulnerability to earthquake hazards by superimposing the distribution of Korea Integrated Seismic System (KISS) and the discretized map of KNP. Total 22 national parks are evaluated, and the results suggest that the improvement of the on-site systems should be necessitated for Gyoengju, Gyeryongsan, Songnisan, Gayasan, and Deogyusan national parks, whereas enhancement of regional systems is required for Bukhansan national park.

• Journal of the Korean Professional Engineers Association
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.47-51
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• 2008

The different result and response of the earthquakes, occurred consecutively at China and Japan in May and June. respectively, is suggestive of the importance of preparedness against earthquake disaster. We learned lesson, although indirect, that the earthquake early warning. earthquake-resistant design, and people's concepts on earthquake can greatly reduce the earthquake hazards. The more preparedness we have in present, the less hazards we will experience for future.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.16 no.2 s.48
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• pp.171-178
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• 2006

The seismological observation of Korea began in 1905, and has been run with continuous earthquake network of observation, expanding to the advanced country, but still has some problems in accuracy and speed for report. There are many problems to announce the early warning system for earthquakes and tsunami in the East Sea because most events in the East Sea occur outside the seismic network. Therefore multi-waveform data conversion and composition from the surrounding countries such as Korea, Japan and Far East Russia are requested in order to improve more accurate determination of the earthquake parameters. We used FESNET(Far East Seismic Network) technology to analyze the May 29 and June 1 Earthquakes, and the March 20, 2005 Fukuoka Earthquake in this research, using the data sets of KMA, Japan(JMA/MIED) and IRIS stations. It was found out that use of FESNET resulted in more better outputs than that of a single network, either KMA or JMA stations.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.39-53
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• 2021

By means of installing sloped rolling-type seismic isolators (SRI), the horizontal acceleration transmitted to the to-be-protected object above can be effectively and significantly reduced under external disturbance. To prevent the maximum horizontal displacement response of SRI from reaching a threshold, designing large and conservative damping force for SRI might be required, which will also enlarge the transmitted acceleration response. In a word, when adopting seismic isolation, minimizing acceleration or displacement responses is always a trade-off. Therefore, this paper proposes that by exploiting the possible information provided by an earthquake early warning system, the damping force applied to SRI which can better control both acceleration and displacement responses might be determined in advance and accordingly adjusted in a semi-active control manner. By using a large number of ground motion records with peak ground acceleration not less than 80 gal, the numerical results present that the maximum horizontal displacement response of SRI is highly correlated with and proportional to some important parameters of input excitations, the velocity pulse energy rate and peak velocity in particular. A control law employing the basic form of hyperbolic tangent function and two objective functions are considered in this study for conceptually developing suitable control algorithms. Compared with the numerical results of simply designing a constant, large damping factor to prevent SRI from pounding, adopting the recommended control algorithms can have more than 60% reduction of acceleration responses in average under the excitations. More importantly, it is effective in reducing acceleration responses under approximately 98% of the excitations.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.107-114
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• 2019

In this paper, the P-wave multiple detection system for the fast and accurate earthquake early warning nearby the epicenter was developed. The developed systems were installed in five selected public buildings for the validation. During the monitoring, a magnitude 2.3 earthquake occurred in Pohang on 26 September 2019. P-wave initial detection algorithms were operated in three out of four systems installed in Pohang area and recorded as seismic events. At the nearest station, 5.5 km from the epicenter, P-wave signal was detected 1.2 seconds after the earthquake, and S-wave was reached 1.02 seconds after the P-wave reached, providing some alarm time. The maximum accelerations recorded in three different stations were 6.28 gal, 6.1 gal, and 5.3 gal, respectively. The alarm algorithm did not work, due to the high threshold of the maximum ground acceleration (25.1 gal) to operate it. If continuous monitoring and analysis are to be carried out in the future, the developed system could use a highly effective earthquake warning system suitable for the domestic situation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.179-185
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• 2020

Recently, in order to improve the performance of the Earthquake Early Warning System (EEWS) and to supplement the effects of earthquake disaster prevention in epicenters or near epicenters, development of on-site EEWS has been attempted. Unlike the national EEWS, which is used for earthquake disaster prevention by using seismic observation networks for earthquake research and observation, on-site EEWS aims at earthquake disaster prevention and therefore requires efficient design and evaluation in terms of performance and cost. At present, Korea lacks the necessary core technologies and operational know-how, including the use of existing EEWS design criteria and evaluation methods for the development of On-Site EEWS as well as EEWS. This study proposes hardware and software design directions and performance evaluation items and methods for seismic data collection, data processing, and analysis for localization of On-Site EEWS based on the seismic accelerometer requirements of the Seismic and Volcanic Disaster Response Act.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.121-128
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• 2024

There are growing concerns that the recently implemented Earthquake Early Warning service is overestimating the rapidly provided earthquake magnitudes (M). As a result, the predicted damages unnecessarily activate earthquake protection systems for critical facilities and lifeline infrastructures that are far away. This study is conducted to improve the estimation accuracy of M by incorporating the observed S-wave seismograms in the near source region after removing the site effects of the seismograms in real time by filtering in the time domain. The ensemble of horizontal S-wave spectra from at least five seismograms without site effects is calculated and normalized to a hypocentric target distance (21.54 km) by using the distance attenuation model of Q(f)=348f^0.52 and a cross-over distance of 50 km. The natural logarithmic mean of the S-wave ensemble spectra is then fitted to Brune's source spectrum to obtain the best estimates for M and stress drop (SD) with the fitting weight of 1/standard deviation. The proposed methodology was tested on the 18 recent inland earthquakes in South Korea, and the condition of at least five records for the near-source region is sufficiently fulfilled at an epicentral distance of 30 km. The natural logarithmic standard deviation of the observed S-wave spectra of the ensemble was calculated to be 0.53 using records near the source for 1~10 Hz, compared to 0.42 using whole records. The result shows that the root-mean-square error of M and ln(SD) is approximately 0.17 and 0.6, respectively. This accuracy can provide a confidence interval of 0.4~2.3 of Peak Ground Acceleration values in the distant range.