Jochen Zschau – författare

During the past few decades of the 20th and the first years of the present Century, economic losses and human casualties due to natural disasters increased exponentially on our planet, mainly because of the increased density of population and industry in high hazard areas. Although the prediction of earthquakes is not practicable yet, the present technology allows a prompt identification of the onset of any dangerous seismic event before it hits an urban area. Hence early warning- and rapid disaster information systems are becoming important means for strengthening the resilience of our society against the negative consequences of extreme seismic events. Earthquake early warning can provide an alert within a few tens of seconds in advance. This small lead time may be used to minimize property damage and loss of lives in metropolitan areas and to aid emergency response. The book provides information on the major EEW systems in operation and on the state of the art of the different blocks forming an EW system: the rapid detection and estimation of the earthquake’s focal parameters, the signal transmission, the engineering interface and the information reliability/false alarm problem.

The past years have seen new technologies that could be utilized for early warning and real-time loss estimation. They include self-organizing sensor networks, new satellite imagery with high resolution, multi-sensor observational capacities, and crowd sourcing. From this and improved physical models, data processing and communication methodologies a significant step towards better early warning technologies has been achieved by research.

At the same time, early warning systems became part of the disaster management practice for instance in Japan and Indonesia. This book marks the important point where:

At this critical point in development of early warning for geological disasters it is timely to provide a volume that documents the state-of-the-art, provides an overview on recent developments and serves as knowledge resource for researcher and practitioners.