A Complete Automatic Procedure to Compile Reliable Seismic Catalogs and Travel‐Time and Strong‐Motion Parameters Datasets

Abstract

The compilation of reliable and complete seismic catalogs represents a fundamental issue for most studies in seismology. Nowadays, the availability of an ever-increasing number of stations and, therefore, the huge amount of recordings to be processed and analyzed require a lot of effort in terms of man-hours. In the present work, we present a fully automatic procedure for compiling seismic catalogs starting from continuous recordings. The procedure relies on a multistep algorithm that includes event detection tool, automatic P- and S-phase picker, hypocenter locator, and magnitude and strong-motion parameter calculator. This automatic procedure is applied for compiling seismic catalogs for two real-world usage scenarios starting from the openaccess waveform database provided by European Integrated Data Archive. The first scenario concerns the monitoring of the seismicity of northwestern Italy; the second one concerns the analysis of the data recorded during the first month of the 2016 sequence in central Italy. The comparison between reference manually revised and automatic seismic catalogs points out negligible differences in terms of both P- and S-phase pickings, hypocentral coordinates, and local magnitude values, thus showing the overall reliability of the procedure. The ability of the proposed automatic procedure in detecting and locating very low-magnitude events is prominent to compile automatic catalogs characterized by a magnitude of completeness significantly lower than that of reference manual catalogs.