The Chilean GNSS Network: Current Status and Progress toward Early Warning Applications

Abstract

Chile is one of the world's most seismically active regions and is therefore extensively studied by the earthquake sciences. The great length of the country hosts a variety of measurement systems allowing for the characterization of earthquake processes over a wide range of timescales and in different phases of the seismic cycle. Starting in the early 1990s, several research groups began to deploy continuously operating geodetic networks in Chile, forming the core of the modern network of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers used to monitor geodynamics from the southern tip of the Americas to the central Andes. Today, the Centro Sismologico Nacional (CSN) of the Universidad de Chile maintains and improves this network, increasing its coverage and spatial density while greatly reducing solution latency. We present the status of the GNSS network, its data streams, and the real-time analysis system used to support real-time modeling of earthquakes. The system takes 2 s, on average, to collect raw data, estimate positions, and stream results. Such low latency is essential to enabling early warning of earthquakes and tsunamis in Chile.