Abstract
After the occurrence of an earthquake near Cairo on October 1992 (Mw 5.8), the Egyptian authorities established the Egyptian National Seismological Network (ENSN), which was targeted to monitor the seismic activity in and around Egypt. The ENSN started operation in 1997 with 66 stations installed by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG). Almost 55,000 events were recorded up until 2018 since the time of ENSN’s operation. After more than 20 years of establishing ENSN, a scientific project was funded to review the detectability of the stations by different methods; so, the goal of this research is to evaluate the magnitude of completeness (Mc) which represents an important parameter for instrumental catalog studies using different catalog-based methods. The Mc is calculated based on deflection from the linear relation of frequency-magnitude of the recorded events in ENSN’s catalog. Calculation of Mc is indispensable for knowing and clarifying the seismicity parameters such as the b value in the Gutenberg-Richter equation. Three different methods were used, i.e., maximum curvature method (MAXC), b value stability approach (MBS), and entire magnitude range method (EMR). The results determine the variations among different methods, up to 0.5 magnitudes unit is observed. The importance of this study comes from its concentrate on the detectability of ENSN’s stations to show their efficiency for recording seismic events with high accuracy and for contributing in evaluation of seismic hazard in Egypt, in seismic engineering applications to mitigate earthquake risk, and in changing the position of bad recording stations to a quieter place with minimum noise level.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to the Department of Seismology, NRIAG, Egypt, for providing this study with seismic data.
Funding
This project was supported financially by the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF), Egypt (Grant No. 25553).
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Current Advances in Geological Research of Egypt
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Hafiez, H.E.A., Toni, M. Magnitude of completeness for the Northern stations of the Egyptian National Seismological Network. Arab J Geosci 13, 458 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-020-05461-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-020-05461-0