A low-cost seismic network for Papua New Guinea  

Authors / CoAuthors

Ghasemi, H. | Itikarai, I. | Hazelwood, M. | McKee, C. | Allen, T.

Abstract

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is situated at the edge of the Pacific “ring of fire” and is exposed to frequent large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes in PNG, such as 2018 Hela Province event (M7.5), continue to cause loss of life and widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure. Given its high seismic hazard, PNG would benefit from a dense seismic monitoring network for rapid (near real-time), as well as long-term, earthquake hazard and risk assessment. Geoscience Australia (GA) is working with technical agencies of PNG Government to deliver a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) funded technical disaster risk reduction (DRR) program to increase community resilience on the impact of natural hazards and other secondary hazards. As part of this program, this study explores the feasibility of establishing a low-cost, community-based seismic network in PNG by first verifying the performance of the low-cost Raspberry Shake 4D seismograph, which includes a three-component strong-motion MEMs accelerometer and one (vertical) short-period geophone. A Shake device was deployed at the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory (RVO) for a period of one month (May 2018), relaying data in real-time via a 3G modem. To assess the performance of the device, it was co-located with global seismic network-quality instruments that included a three-component broadband seismometer and a strong motion accelerometer operated by GA and RVO, respectively. A key challenge for this study was the rather poor data service by local telecommunication operators as well as frequent power outages which caused repeated data gaps. Despite such issues, the Shake device successfully recorded several earthquakes with magnitudes as low as mb 4.0 at epicentral distances of 600 km, including earthquakes that were not reported by international agencies. The time-frequency domain comparisons of the recorded waveforms with those by the permanent RVO instruments reveal very good agreement in a relatively wide frequency range of 0.1-10 Hz. Based on the estimated noise model of the Shake device (seismic noise as well as instrument noise), we explore the hypothetical performance of the device against typical ground-motion amplitudes for various size earthquakes at different source-to-site distances. Presented at the 2018 Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) Conference

Product Type

document

eCat Id

123839

Contact for the resource

Keywords

theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf

• EARTH SCIENCES

( {1} )

• seismic network

( {1} )

• community

( {1} )

• raspberry shake

( {1} )

• earthquake monitoring

( {1} )

• tectonic activity

( {1} )

• Pacific Nations

( {1} )

• Hazard Response

( {1} )

• Natural Hazards

( {1} )

• Papua New Guinea - PNG

( {1} )

• Published_External

Publication Date

2024-08-21T06:09:42

Creation Date

Security Constraints

Classification - unclassified

Legal Constraints

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

Access - license

Use - license

Status

completed

Purpose

Conference paper

Maintenance Information

asNeeded

Topic Category

geoscientificInformation

Series Information

Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) Conference, Nov 16-18, 2018 Perth, WA

Lineage

Abstract presented at the 2018 Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) Conference

Parent Information

Extents

[-11.636, -1.3464, 140.85, 155.97]

Reference System

Spatial Resolution

Service Information

Associations

Downloads and Links

Link to Conference Page  

Link to Abstract  

Source Information