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Spatiotemporal evolution of the completeness magnitude of the Icelandic earthquake catalogue from 1991 to 2013

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Abstract

In 1991, a digital seismic monitoring network was installed in Iceland with a digital seismic system and automatic operation. After 20 years of operation, we explore for the first time its nationwide performance by analysing the spatiotemporal variations of the completeness magnitude. We use the Bayesian magnitude of completeness (BMC) method that combines local completeness magnitude observations with prior information based on the density of seismic stations. Additionally, we test the impact of earthquake location uncertainties on the BMC results, by filtering the catalogue using a multivariate analysis that identifies outliers in the hypocentre error distribution. We find that the entire North-to-South active rift zone shows a relatively low magnitude of completeness Mc in the range 0.5–1.0, highlighting the ability of the Icelandic network to detect small earthquakes. This work also demonstrates the influence of earthquake location uncertainties on the spatiotemporal magnitude of completeness analysis.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Editor Prof. Mariano Garcia-Fernandez and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful advices that greatly contributed to the improvement of the quality of the paper. The catalogue used in this work is available upon request to the corresponding author. All the maps and graphics were obtained through open-source and freely available Matlab code MapSeis, which can be downloaded from http://www.corssa.org/mapseis, and statistical computations were performed through R code https://www.r-project.org/. The authors are also grateful to the Icelandic Meteorological Office for providing access to the SIL catalogue data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Science, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Francesco Panzera

  2. Institute of Geophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

    Arnaud Mignan

  3. Icelandic Meteorological Office, Processing and Research Division, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Kristin S. Vogfjörð

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  1. Francesco Panzera
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  2. Arnaud Mignan
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  3. Kristin S. Vogfjörð
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Correspondence to Francesco Panzera.

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Panzera, F., Mignan, A. & Vogfjörð, K.S. Spatiotemporal evolution of the completeness magnitude of the Icelandic earthquake catalogue from 1991 to 2013. J Seismol 21, 615–630 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-016-9623-3

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