Integrated Seismic Event Detection and Location by Advanced Array Processing

The principal objective of this two-year study is to develop and test a new advanced, automatic approach to seismic detection/location using array processing. We address a strategy to obtain significantly improved precision in the location of low-magnitude events compared with current fully-automatic approaches, combined with a low false alarm rate. We have developed and evaluated a prototype automatic system which uses as a basis regional array processing with fixed, carefully calibrated, site-specific parameters in conjuction with improved automatic phase onset time estimation. We have in parallel developed tools for Matched Field Processing for optimized detection and source-region identification of seismic signals. This narrow-band procedure aims to mitigate some of the causes of difficulty encountered using the standard array processing system, specifically complicated source-time histories of seismic events and shortcomings in the plane-wave approximation for seismic phase arrivals at regional arrays