Locating oceanic earthquakes-the influence of regional models and location criteria

Abstract

Earthquakes in oceanic areas are normally located using traveltime tables which are representative of continental paths, since most seismic stations lie on continents. It should therefore be possible to improve such locations by employing a set of traveltimes more appropriate to paths from oceanic events to continental stations. A comparison has therefore been made between locations for a number of oceanic events using the recent iasp91 global traveltimes and the times for the pac91 model derived from observations of events in the Pacific. Although there were often significant differences in the location estimates for the two models, these were often no larger than the shifts induced by changing the misfit criterion used for determining the location. For events in purely oceanic regions such as Tonga and the Marianas with little nearby continent, the results from the pac91 model either provided a significantly better fit to the data or produced depth estimates in close accord with independent constraints (e.g. centroid moment tensor locations). In these cases the use of a specific set of ‘oceanic’ traveltimes can be recommended. However for marginal zones and island arcs, the situation is less clear and it is probably best to employ the global traveltime set with the use of additional phases to improve depth estimates.