Search

Central Asia belongs to the regions of the world most exposed to high levels of seismic hazard. After the collapse of Soviet Union, the seismic monitoring in this area decreased significantly in quality and quantity since the maintenance of previous analog networks dealt with serious economic difficulties. Moreover, the installation of modern digital network was limited to few cases (e.g. stations in Kazakhstan or the KNET deployed in Kyrgyzstan). In the last decade the situation improved but still the new networks are concentrated in a few regions and devoted mainly to weak-motion seismology. In this article, we describe the installation of a small strong-motion network in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, intended for earthquake early warning and rapid response purposes. Low cost strong-motion stations developed at GFZ have been installed in seven buildings spread over the town, each one monitored by several sensing units to accomplish also the task of structural health monitoring. The stations communicate via wireless link and the streams collected by one specific station are communicated to the data management center via internet. Each unit has computational power, allowing for decentralized operations related to on-site early warning. An extension of this network to a regional early warning network for real time risk assessment is expected in the near future., System Erde; 3

System Erde; 1, The tsunami of 26 December 2004 in the Indian Ocean, generated by an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.3 offshore Northern Sumatra, caused one of the largest natural disasters in history. As a reaction to this devastating catastrophe a Tsunami Early Warning System is being developed and installed in the region since 2005. This article describes the causes of a tsunami, and explains the concept, technical components and functionality of the Early Warning System.