Ra. Uhrhammer et al., Best practice in earthquake location using broadband three-component seismic waveform data, PUR A GEOPH, 158(1-2), 2001, pp. 259-276
We present an earthquake location algorithm, the Broadband Waveform Regiona
l Earthquake Location Program (BW_RELP), which utilizes phase onset times a
nd wave azimuths recorded by three-component broadband seismic stations and
an adaptive migrating grid search algorithm to find the global minimum in
an arbitrary normed misfit parameter. The performance of BW_RELP is demonst
rated using regional (300-800 km distant) broadband recordings to locate ev
ents in the 1995 Ridgecrest, California earthquake sequence. The purpose of
this study is to introduce the BW_RELP algorithm in detail and to expand o
n the previous paper by Dreger et al. (BSSA, 88, 1353-1362, 1998), using on
e Berkeley Digital Seismic Network (EDSN) station (YBH) and two USNSN stati
ons (ELK and MNV) which span 300-800 km in distance and 55 degrees in azimu
th, to further investigate the capability of a sparse broadband network of
three-component stations at monitoring a region located outside of the netw
ork, as will be the case in the monitoring of the Comprehensive Test-Ban-Tr
eaty (CTBT) for low magnitude seismic events. We assess the capability of t
his sparse three-station broadband network and we compare locations estimat
ed from phase onse: time and wave azimuth measurements to a ground-truth ca
talog of high-quality earthquake locations derived from data recorded by th
e Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN). The results indicate that in
the regional distance range it is possible, when an appropriate calibration
event is available, to obtain absolute event locations to within 18 km as
is prescribed by the CTBT.