As the largest water conservancy and hydropower project in China, the Three Gorges Reservoir is a weak seismic activity area before impoundment, but the frequency of earthquakes increases significantly after impoundment. The spatial density scanning method was used to obtain the characteristics of spatio-temporal earthquake distribution in the reservoir area during loading and unloading processes. The results show that the frequencies of earthquakes during the loading and unloading processes were higher than that during the low-water-level operation period, which is well explained by the acoustic emission test results. The seismic b-value, fractal dimension D, and spatial correlation length SCL can be used together to indicate stress criticality. To analyze the impacts of reservoir water loading and unloading on seismicity in the reservoir area, time-scan analyses were performed on the b-value, D-value, and SCL of earthquakes near the Zigui segment and the Badong segment. Previous studies argued that the time-varying characteristics of b-values do not hold predictive significance for earthquakes in the M4.0–6.2 range. However, our study found that the time-varying characteristics of b-values are of predictive significance for earthquakes around M4.0. These seismic parameters decrease significantly before moderate earthquakes but at different rates in different regions.

Several commercial seismometers now support CSTP, the real-time communication protocol used in the China Earthquake Early Warning System, but there is still no simple, flexible, and low-cost solution to archive CSTP streams or integrate them into existing data processing systems. In this study, we design and implement SharpCEEWPServer, a lightweight, out-of-the-box graphical server that integrates client management, real-time data reception, visualization, and archiving, and can, via RingServer, convert CSTP real-time streams into widely supported SeedLink streams. Hardware compatibility is evaluated using four commercial CSTP-capable instruments, a forwarding chain is built to assess forwarding functionality and reliability, and concurrency performance is tested using simulated networks with different station counts. The stability under network impairment scenarios and the performance of the forwarding system were also analyzed. The results show that the server can reliably receive and forward real-time data streams, and that laptop-class hardware is sufficient to withstand the load imposed by an M7.0 earthquake scenario when receiving real-time streams from 1000 three-component seismometers. However, the current version’s latency performance can only meet the needs of non-early warning networks. Overall, the proposed server significantly lowers the deployment and usage threshold for new CSTP-capable instruments and provides an efficient, low-cost integration solution for temporary networks in earthquake emergency response and seismic arrays.