Slowness and azimuth determination for Bucovina array (BURAR) applying multiple signal techniques

Abstract

The BURAR seismic array, located in Northern Romania (Bucovina region), is designed to monitor events located in an area poorly covered by other existing seismic stations. In order to use the BURAR array for single-station locations, it is crucial to calibrate the azimuth and slowness parameters, which are currently used in array techniques to locate earthquakes, blasts or nuclear explosions. The goal of this study is to apply “f–k” and plane wave fit techniques in order to constrain the slowness and azimuth parameters at BURAR for teleseismic, regional and local events. The analysis was carried out using P and S waves recorded for events occurred between 2004 and 2008 within a radius of 50° around BURAR. The azimuth values obtained applying both methods strongly deviated from the theoretical values for regions like Central Turkey, Bulgaria, Dodecanese Islands and other parts of Greece, while the ray parameter deviations with respect to a 1-D IASP91 reference model are less significant. For the local events, the anomalies are smaller, except the particular case of Vrancea intermediate-depth earthquakes for which strong azimuth deviations (33.5°), both positive and negative, are observed. We investigate how these systematic deviations in azimuth are explained by the structure lateral heterogeneities which characterize the study region.