Compilation of a recent seismicity data base of the greater Alpine region from several seismological networks and preliminary 3D tomographic results

Abstract

Local earthquake data collected by seven national and regional seismic networks have been compiled into a travel time catalog of 32341 earthquakes for the period 1980 to 1995 in South-Central Europe. As a prerequisite, a complete and corrected station list (master station list) has been prepared according to updated information provided by every network. By simultaneous inversion of some 600 well-locatable events we obtained one-dimensional (1D) velocity propagation models for each network. Consequently, these velocity models with appropriate station corrections have been used to obtain high-quality hypocenter locations for events inside and among the station networks. For better control, merging of phase data from several networks was performed as an iterative process where at each iteration two data sets of neighbouring networks or groups of networks were merged. Particular care was taken to detect and correctly identify phase data from events common to data sets from two different networks. In case of reports of the same phase data from more than one network, the phase data from the network owning and servicing the station were used according to the master station list. The merging yielded a data set of 278007 P and 191074 S-wave travel time observations from 32341 events in the greater Alpine region. Restrictive selection (number of P-wave observations >7; gap <160 degrees) yielded a data set of about 10000 events with a total of more than 128000 P and 87000 S-wave observations well suited for local earthquake seismic tomography study. Preliminary tomographic results for South-Central Europe clearly show the topography of the crust-mantle boundary in the greater Alpine region and outline the 3D structure of the seismic Ivrea body.