Abstract
Instrumental catalogues of earthquakes in the subduction zone of the Lesser Antilles are produced by local observatories and the International Seismological Centre. But none of these catalogues merge all arrival times of the first regional phases available; in addition, they have a magnitude of completeness relatively high for the entire Lesser Antilles area. As part of the Antilles Seismological Data Centre project, we produced a unified catalogue of known earthquakes from 1972 to 2012, with optimal constraints on the hypocentre locations. We re-evaluated the hypocentres with the method used in local observatories and a probabilistic method improving the distributions of arrival time residuals. We developed a simple method to select the preferred hypocentre independently of the localization algorithm, and we offer a complete catalogue including 46,703 earthquakes. Compared to other existing catalogues, we provide additional arrival times for 24,528 earthquakes. Our results highlight the variabilities of the magnitude of completeness and of the seismicity suggesting how the future analysis could infer the mechanisms of heterogeneous seismic coupling and intermediate-depth triggering.
Highlights
Seismic activity in the Lesser Antilles is recorded separately by five regional institutes (PRSN, FUNVISIS, KNMI, SRC-UWI, and Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP)), which operated 14 seismic networks during the period of study (Figure 1)
The seismic networks operated by the OVS-IPGP include both seismometer and strong motion accelerometer networks, the latter belonging to the French Réseau Accelérometrique Permanent [RESIF, 1995a]
Our study is a manifest of a new earthquake catalogue for the Lesser Antilles with unprecedented completeness and precision
Summary
Seismic activity in the Lesser Antilles is recorded separately by five regional institutes (PRSN, FUNVISIS, KNMI, SRC-UWI, and IPGP), which operated 14 seismic networks during the period of study (Figure 1). Between 2008 and 2013, the OVS-IPGP and the SRC-UWI have built the West Indies broadband network [network code WI, Clouard et al, 2009, Anglade et al, 2015] as the first shared high quality broadband regional seismic network. This network has been designed with two main purposes: to improve the characterization of the regional seismicity related to the subduction processes at the scale of the Lesser Antilles active volcanic arc, and to contribute to the Caribbean Tsunami Early Warning System, which has been developing since 2005, under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the UNESCO. While a common Lesser Antilles catalogue is not yet being produced, it should be possible with the WI network as these data are available on international seismic data centres (such as the French seismological and geodetic network—Résif, the European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA), or Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS))
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