SEISMIC MULTIPLETS ANALYSIS AND ITS IMPLICATION IN SEISMOTECTONICS

Doublets analysis techniques suitable to obtain very accurate determin ation of arrival times of seismic phases on different stations are pre sented. These methodologies represent a very powerful tool to recogniz e the seismotectonic structures and to study the propagation character istics of seismic waves. The signals similarity analysis, performed in the frequency and time domain, has been applied to increase the preci sion in arrival times definition of seismic phases generated by the sa me sources and having the same path. Tests on synthetic events have sh own how it is possible to recognize the time delay between digital tra ces with a sensitivity less than the sample rate. In particular, in th e time-domain analysis the results obtained using different interpolat ion functions (parabolic and sine for the cross-correlation operator) are compared. The analysis slightly suffers from a random noise compon ent added to the signal, allowing the phase picking of highly noised t races. On the contrary, the frequency domain analysis offers the best results in case of high signal-to-noise ratio, while it appears less ' robust' with respect to high noise influence. The application of relat ive location techniques on the obtained arrival times allows to define with very high detail the geometrical shape of seismogenetic structur es. As an example, a case of spatial doublets, recorded by the seismic network of Northwestern Italy, that occurred during two days in an ar ea of the Maritime Alps (Italy), has been considered. In spite of the low magnitude of the events, an accurate reconstruction of the spatial distribution of the sources was obtained, allowing to discriminate th e fault plane from the auxiliary one in the focal mechanism solution.