PRESTo Early Warning System

PRESTo is a free and open source software platform for Earthquake Early Warning. It integrates recent algorithms for real-time, rapid earthquake location, magnitude estimation and damage assessment.

It is a lightweight, graphical application easily installable on either Windows, Linux and Mac. PRESTo is self-contained: it does not require any other seismic software or platform to run, just the ground motion data from a seismic network.

PRESTo continually processes real-time streams of three-component acceleration data for P-waves arrival detection. These data can be streamed from a SeisComP server or directly from the the stations via the SeedLink protocol, as well as from SAC files in play-back mode. While a (real or simulated) event is occurring, the software promptly performs event detection and provides location and magnitude estimates as well as shaking predictions at target sites.

Alarm messages containing the evolutionary estimates of source and target parameters, sent over the internet, can thus reach vulnerable infrastructures at a distance before the destructive waves, enabling the initiation of automatic safety procedures.

This regional approach to Early Warning is integrated with an on-site, threshold-based method for the definition of independent local alert levels at each station, based on the dominant period τc and the peak displacement in a short time window after the first P-arrival time. The alert level can be used to initiate safety measures at each site independently of the regional processing.

The local alert levels can be combined with the estimated source parameters to define, at the regional scale, the extent of the Potential Damage Zone (PDZ), i.e. the area in which the highest intensity levels are expected.