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Precise point positioning (PPP) can measure ground motions with a centimetre-level accuracy using only one receiver. It has been widely used in earthquake monitoring and earthquake early warning (EEW) systems. However, traditional PPP highly depends on well-established and robust internet infrastructure for data communication. Along with the broadcast ephemeris, the orbit and clock corrections transmitted by the B2b signals of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) can be used to recover the precise products of GPS and BDS. Since the B2b products, namely the satellite state parameter messages, are accessible even without internet infrastructure, PPP with B2b signals is more suitable for real-time applications. This study witnesses the application of PPP with B2b products in seismic monitoring for the first time. The shake table experiments demonstrate that PPP with B2b can reach a millimetre-level accuracy in horizontal in earthquake monitoring for GPS-only, BDS-only and GPS/BDS combination. The application to the 2021 M w 7.4 Maduo earthquake shows that the accuracies of seismic displacements derived from GPS-only PPP with B2b products are 1.7, 2.4 and 1.7 cm in east, north and vertical components, compared with those from GPS-only PPP with final precise products. We therefore conclude that PPP with B2b products has a promising prospect in seismogeodesy and related applications such as EEW and rapid hazard response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For earthquake and tsunami early warning and emergency response, earthquake magnitude is the crucial parameter to be determined rapidly and correctly. However, a reliable and rapid measurement of the magnitude of an earthquake is a challenging problem, especially for large earthquakes (M > 8). Here, the magnitude is determined based on the GPS displacement waveform derived from real-time precise point positioning (RTPPP). RTPPP results are evaluated with an accuracy of 1 cm in the horizontal components and 2–3 cm in the vertical components, indicating that the RTPPP is capable of detecting seismic waves with amplitude of 1 cm horizontally and 2–3 cm vertically with a confidence level of 95 per cent. In order to estimate the magnitude, the unique information provided by the GPS displacement waveform is the horizontal peak displacement amplitude. We show that the empirical relation of Gutenberg (1945) between peak displacement and magnitude holds up to nearly magnitude 9.0 when displacements are measured with GPS. We tested the proposed method for three large earthquakes. For the 2010 Mw 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake, our method provides a magnitude of M7.18 ± 0.18. For the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-oki earthquake the estimated magnitude is M8.74 ± 0.06, and for the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake the value is M8.7 ± 0.1 after excluding some near-field stations. We, therefore, conclude that depending on the availability of high-rate GPS observations, a robust value of magnitude up to 9.0 for a point source earthquake can be estimated within tens of seconds or a few minutes after an event using a few GPS stations close to the epicentre. The rapid magnitude could be as a pre-requisite for tsunami early warning, fast source inversion and emergency response is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]