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A Revised Earthquake Catalogue for South Iceland

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Abstract

In 1991, a new seismic monitoring network named SIL was started in Iceland with a digital seismic system and automatic operation. The system is equipped with software that reports the automatic location and magnitude of earthquakes, usually within 1–2 min of their occurrence. Normally, automatic locations are manually checked and re-estimated with corrected phase picks, but locations are subject to random errors and systematic biases. In this article, we consider the quality of the catalogue and produce a revised catalogue for South Iceland, the area with the highest seismic risk in Iceland. We explore the effects of filtering events using some common recommendations based on network geometry and station spacing and, as an alternative, filtering based on a multivariate analysis that identifies outliers in the hypocentre error distribution. We identify and remove quarry blasts, and we re-estimate the magnitude of many events. This revised catalogue which we consider to be filtered, cleaned, and corrected should be valuable for building future seismicity models and for assessing seismic hazard and risk. We present a comparative seismicity analysis using the original and revised catalogues: we report characteristics of South Iceland seismicity in terms of b value and magnitude of completeness. Our work demonstrates the importance of carefully checking an earthquake catalogue before proceeding with seismicity analysis.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported with funds provided by the European project REAKT Strategies and tools for Real-Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion. All the maps and graphics were obtained through open-source and freely available matlab code MapSeis, that can be downloaded from http://www.corssa.org/mapseis. The authors wish to thank the Guest Editor Prof. Jiancang Zhuang, Dr. Marie Keiding and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments which contributed to improve the quality of the paper. 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. Icelandic Meteorological Office, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Francesco Panzera & Kristín S. Vogfjörd

  2. Università di Catania, Dipartimento di Scienze Biologiche, Geologiche e Ambientali, Catania, Italy

    Francesco Panzera

  3. Swiss Seismological Service (SED), ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

    J. Douglas Zechar & David A. J. Eberhard

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  1. Francesco Panzera
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  2. J. Douglas Zechar
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Correspondence to Francesco Panzera.

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Panzera, F., Zechar, J.D., Vogfjörd, K.S. et al. A Revised Earthquake Catalogue for South Iceland. Pure Appl. Geophys. 173, 97–116 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-015-1115-9

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