Preliminary definition of geophysical regions for the Middle East and North Africa

The ability to calibrate seismic stations to improve the monitoring of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is partially limited by the availability of seismic events with known locations and source properties. To confidently extrapolate from these events to aseismic regions, and to properly account for discontinuities in seismic properties requires accurate geophysical models. This paper lays out a preliminary, first-order, regionalization of the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. The model specifies boundaries and velocity structures based on the geology and tectonics of the region, previously published studies, and empirical data observations by the LLNL group. This model is a starting point and is expected to be improved and refined by comparisons with ongoing tomography efforts and the collection of new data. We anticipate that this model and its successors will prove useful as a background model in the process of forming station calibration maps based on intelligent interpolation techniques such as kriging. We also hope the model, as it improves and demonstrates some predictive power, will provide a reference model for broader CTBT research efforts in detection, location and discrimination as well as other aspects of earth science