A Geodetic-Based Earthquake Early Warning System for Colombia and Ecuador

Abstract

Colombia and Ecuador sit at one of the most diverse tectonic regimes in the world, located at the intersection of five tectonic plates (Bird, 2003) encompassing many geophysical hazard regimes, multiple subduction zones, and broad diffuse areas of significant deformation. Notably, the subduction of the Nazca plate under South America has produced at least seven large (>Mw 7) and damaging earthquakes since 1900—the largest being the 1906 Mw 8.8 event. Both Colombia and Ecuador have made significant investments in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks to study tectonic and volcanic deformation. Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems like the U.S.-operated ShakeAlert system (Murray et al., 2018, 2023) utilize real-time Global Navigation Satellite System (RT-GNSS) to rapidly characterize the largest, most damaging earthquakes in situations where seismic networks alone saturate (Melgar et al., 2015, 2016; Allen and Melgar, 2019; Ruhl et al., 2019). Both Colombia and Ecuador have large vulnerable populations proximal to the coast that may sustain significant damage in these large subduction events (Pulido et al., 2020) and yet farther enough away that an RT-GNSS EEW system could offer significant warning times to these populations and associated infrastructure. We examine the status of the Servicio Geológico Colombiano Geodesia: Red de Estudios de Deformación GNSS network in Colombia and the Escuela Politécnica Nacional GNSS network in Ecuador, their spatial distribution, and the current status of their data streams to determine what augmentations are required to support the real-time detection and modeling of large destructive earthquakes in and near Colombia and Ecuador.