Study of the seismicity in the Western Alps by developing and applying an automatic earthquake detection and location Method

Abstract

We developed a (almost) fully automatic earthquake detection and location method to study seismicity on regional scales based on array-processing techniques. We combined the beam-formed network response with template matched-filtering to enhance detection capabilities. We applied our method to the study of the seismicity of the Western Alps, and we claim that it can be applied in many different contexts to quickly get high quality earthquake catalogs. The study of the seismicity of the Western Alps revealed continuous seismic activity, organized into background and strongly clustered seismicity. We detected 9,018 seismic events from August 2012 to August 2013, outperforming the reference catalog that accounts for 1,698 events in the same period. Comparisons between our catalog and reference catalogs/ studies show that we retrieve well the main features of the region. We also studied source parameter differences between background seismicity earthquakes and clustered seismicity earthquakes. Using spectral ratios of collocated events, we measured the seismic moments Mo and corner frequencies f, for earthquakes detected with a subset of 11 template events. We found that background seismicity earthquakes follow the scaling law ... usually associated with self-similar earthquakes, whereas clustered earthquakes strongly deviate from this scaling law. Our observations show that the corner frequencies exhibit little dependency on the seismic moments, following a scaling law around ... We conclude that, in our study region, the degree of clustering seems to be driven by the rupture mechanism.