Earthquake location from P-arrival times only: problems and some solutions

Abstract

Selected problems related to accurate hypocenter locations are discussed in the difficult case that only reliable P-wave readings are available. Near stations are usually only few, and often have a poor azimuthal coverage. As such, they are insufficient because the inversion is highly ill-posed, and the epicenter position strongly trades-off with depth. Thus more distant stations are also needed to obtain the correct epicenter. However, joint use of near and distant stations present another difficulty; it may yield a significantly incorrect depth estimate in case that the crustal model is not fully appropriate. In practice, the erroneous depth often remains unrecognized. An indication of the depth problem can be obtained by analyzing the travel-time residuals at individual stations. It is also useful to check fully independent depth estimates, for example those from the centroid-moment-tensor analysis. If the problematic crustal model is detected, and it is not easy to find a better one, the near- and distant station effects should be decoupled (a two-step location): the epicenter is calculated from all stations, kept fixed, and the source depth is grid-search beneath the epicenter by means of the near stations. The ideas are applied to the Mw 5.2 Efpalio (Western Greece) earthquake of January 18, 2010, and the following aftershock sequence.