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
\nrepresents a fundamental issue for most studies in seismology.
\nNowadays, 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.
\nIn the present work, we present a fully automatic procedure for
\ncompiling seismic catalogs starting from continuous recordings.
\nThe procedure relies on a multistep algorithm that includes event
\ndetection tool, automatic P- and S-phase picker, hypocenter locator, and magnitude and strong-motion parameter calculator.
\nThis 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
\nArchive. 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
\nsequence in central Italy. The comparison between reference
\nmanually 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
\noverall reliability of the procedure. The ability of the proposed
\nautomatic procedure in detecting and locating very low-magnitude events is prominent to compile automatic catalogs characterized by a magnitude of completeness significantly lower than
\nthat of reference manual catalog