Broad-scale applicability of correlation detectors to China seismicity

Abstract

It is demonstrated that cross-correlation methods can successfully be applied on a large scale to the detection of seismic events arising in a variety of tectonic settings. The locations of about thousand earthquakes a year occurring in and near China are reported using phase picks from a large national network. We performed more than 100 million cross correlations on the waveforms of more than 18,800 events over 20 years, as recorded by a relatively sparse network; and detected about two thirds of the nationally reported events. Additional events (70% increase), beyond what standard processing detects for China on the sparse network, were also found. A corresponding reduction in detection threshold approaches 0.9 magnitude units for increasing station distance. As networks densify and archives grow, cross-correlation is likely to become more and more useful for purposes of maximizing the number of detected events and hence to improve knowledge of seismicity. Copyright 2009 by the American Geophysical Union.