Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) was proved to be a potential means of disaster reduction. Unfortunately, the performance of the EEW system is largely determined by the density of EEW network. How to reduce the cost of sensors has become an urgent problem for building a dense EEW. A low-cost seismic sensor integrated with a Class C MEMS accelerometer was proposed in this paper. Based on minimal structure design, the sensor’s reliability was enhanced, while the costs were cut down as well. To fully reveal the performance, ten of the seismic sensors were installed and tested in Sichuan Province, southwest of China from May 2018 to February 2019. The seismic records obtained by the MNSMSs were compared with those by the traditional strong motion seismographs. The records obtained by the MNSMSs have good consistency with the data obtained by the Etnas. The MNSMSs can obtain clear seismic phases that are enough to trigger earthquake detections for EEW. By noise analysis, different channels of the same sensor and different sensors have good consistency. The tested dynamic range (over 87 dB) and useful resolution (over 14.5 bits) are completely in conformity with the designed parameters. Through real field testing, small earthquakes (M 3.1–3.6) can be detected by all three components E-W, N-S, and U-D within 50 km. In all, the low-cost seismic sensor proposed as a high-performance Class C MEMS sensor can meet the needs of dense EEW in terms of noise, dynamic range, useful resolution, reliability, and detecting capabilities.

How to estimate an earthquake’s magnitude rapidly and accurately is a challenge for any earthquake early warning system. In order to reach a balance between accuracy and timeliness, a synchronous magnitude estimation method with P-wave phases’ detection is proposed. In this method, the P-wave phases are detected by the changes of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the seismic records, where the SNRs are calculated by the short-term power and long-term power ratio (STP/LTP). Meanwhile, the variations of the SNR are applied to estimate the magnitude of the earthquake. By the statistics of some earthquake cases, a synchronous magnitude estimation model of the variation of the P-wave phases’ SNR, the earthquake magnitude, and the hypocentral distance was built. Compared with some other magnitude estimation methods, the suggested method inherits the robustness of the STP/LTP method and is more accurate and rapid than the peak displacement ($P_d$) method.

Earthquake early warning (EEW) systems can give people warnings before damaging ground motions reach their site and can reduce earthquake-related losses. It has been shown that Bayesian reference can be used to estimate earthquake magnitude, location, and the distribution of peak ground motion using observed ground-motion amplitudes, predefined prior information, and appropriate attenuation relationships. In this article, we describe a Bayesian approach to earthquake early warning (EEW) systems for the estimation of magnitude (M) and peak ground-motion velocity (PGV) using the Gutenberg–Richter relation as a priori probability derived from statistical historical earthquake information from the Japanese KiK-net. Moreover, using the magnitude M_j = 4.5 and PGV = 0.4 cm/s as the warning threshold, an earthquake hazard discrimination model was established. Following this, the proposed approach was compared with the traditional fitting method to analyze the earthquake hazard discrimination using an M_j = 4.3 earthquake in the Mt. Fuji area and an M_j = 5.5 earthquake in the Ibaraki area of Japan as examples. The results are as follows: (1) The probabilistic algorithm founded on the predictive model of the magnitude from the average period (τ_c) and PGV from the displacement amplitude (P_d) from the initial 3 s of the P wave is able to provide a fast and accurate estimation of the final magnitude and location. (2) The Bayesian inference approach for the earthquake hazard discrimination model has a 2.94% miss rate and a 5.88% false alarm rate, which is lower than that of the traditional fitting method, thus increasing the accuracy and reliability of earthquake hazard estimation.

To mitigate the earthquake damage, casualties and economic losses, the capacities of disasters monitoring and ear warning need to be strengthened. For this reason, a seismic intensity monitoring system was put forward in this paper. The monitoring system is composed of seismic intensity instrument and seismic intensity rapid report center. The seismic intensity instrument which is the front end of the system can measure the ground motion acceleration and calculate the intensity value rapidly. The seismic intensity rapid report center is responsible for seismic intensity information acquisition, analysis, processing and dissemination automatically. Through the preliminary theory and experiment analysis, the system could meet the needs for emergency response.