Articles | Volume 40
https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-40-27-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-40-27-2015
12 Jan 2015
 | 12 Jan 2015

Detecting and locating seismic events with using USArray as a large antenna

L. Retailleau, N. M. Shapiro, J. Guilbert, M. Campillo, and P. Roux

Abstract. We design an earthquake detection and location algorithm that explores coherence and characteristic behavior of teleseismic waves recorded by a large-scale seismic network. The procedure consists of three steps. First, for every tested source location we construct a time-distance gather by computing great-circle distances to all stations of the network and aligning the signals respectively. Second, we use the constructed gather to compute a Tau-P transform. For waves emitted by teleseismic sources, the amplitude of this transform has a very characteristic behavior with maxima corresponding to different seismic phases. Relative location of these maxima on the time-slowness plane strongly depends on the distance to the earthquake. To explore this dependence, in a third step, we convolve the Tau-P amplitude with a time-slowness filter whose maxima are computed based on prediction of a global travel-time calculator. As a result of this three-step procedure, we obtain a function that characterizes a likelihood of occurrence of a seismic event at a given position in space and time. We test the developed algorithm by applying it to vertical-component records of USArray to locate a set of earthquakes distributed around the Globe with magnitudes between 6.1 and 7.2.