A Unified Catalog of Main Earthquakes for Northern Algeria from A.D. 856 to 2008

Abstract

The primary goal of this work is to catalog all the main earthquake events above magnitude MW 4.0 in northern Algeria and its surrounding region, specifically for the area between 32° to 38°N and 3°W to 10°E, as part of a project to reassess the seismic hazard in this zone. The catalog can be downloaded from the University of Jaen Web site at http://www.ujaen.es/investiga/rnm024/northern\_algerian\_catalog.dat. Until now, there have been only partial (albeit useful) catalogs compiled specifically for this zone (Rothe 1950; Grandjean 1954; Mokrane et al. 1994; Yelles Chauche et al. , 2002; Yelles Chauche, Deramchi et al. 2003), as well as regional earthquake catalogs that included seismicity for this area ( e.g. , Mezcua and Martinez Solares 1983; Benouar 1994; El Mrabet 2005; Godey et al. 2006); however, none of these catalogs focused on seismic hazard studies. The main drawbacks of these catalogs are: no usage of a unified magnitude, coverage of only a short time interval for this type of study, inclusion of non-Poissonian events, and no consideration of known mainshocks in the historical period. In recent years, several efforts have been made to compile more or less complete, homogeneous, and accurate new catalogs in different regions of the world in order to define and characterize seismicity, forecast long-term seismicity, or perform seismic-hazard analysis ( e.g. , Kagan et al. 2006; Pelaez et al. 2007; Wang et al. 2009; Yadav et al. 2009). Along these same lines, we present the most complete and homogeneous unified catalog that we could compile, collecting earthquakes from several individual and international seismological agencies, as well as from research papers reporting seismicity data. To achieve this goal, we performed a declustering analysis and a magnitude unification process in order to provide a unified …