A comprehensive study of the 2016 Mw 6.0 Italy earthquake based on high-rate (10?Hz) GPS data

The 2016 M_w 6.0 Italy earthquake is successfully recorded by the near-field 10?Hz GPS and 200?Hz Strong Motion (SM) stations, providing valuable data for this study. A comprehensive study of this earthquake is carried out based on GPS data, which contains coseismic deformations analysis, noise analysis, seismic wave picking, and magnitude determination. The noise of most GPS-derived displacement waveforms can be described as a combination of white noise, flicker noise, and random walk noise after the earthquake occurrence, and the spectral indices vary significantly for most stations, implying that the seismic signals have affected the noise characteristic of GPS-derived displacement waveforms. S-transform is employed to assess the GPS capability to detect the seismic arrival time. The SM station AMT and the GPS station AMAT are in good agreement in seismic wave picking, and the difference is only 1.2?s in the north component, suggesting that the outcome of seismic wave picking using GPS data is reliable. Then, a classic empirical formula is employed to determine the moment magnitude. A robust moment magnitude (Mw 5.90) can be estimated by the nine GPS stations with about 23.9?s. If four GPS stations near the epicenter is chosen to determine the magnitude, it only take 13.0?s to retrieve a reliable preliminary (Mw 5.82) magnitude, which is 5.4?s ahead of nine stations. In addition, Cross Wavelet Transform (XWT) is adopted to measuring the correlation and phase relationship between GPS and SM records. The result of XWT analysis indicates 10?Hz GPS is capable of capturing reliable and accurate coseismic dynamic deformations, as evidenced by the XWT-based semblance being close to 1 between GPS and SM records. The above results confirm the capability of 10?Hz GPS to capture coseismic dynamic deformations, detect seismic arrival time, and determine earthquake magnitude. Moreover, rapid magnitude determination based on 10?Hz GPS data can be regarded as an important supplement to Earthquake Early Warning (EEW).