Seismological Research Letters; May 2008; v. 79; no. 3;
p. 393-399; DOI: 10.1785/gssrl.79.3.393
© 2008 Seismological Society of America
Using Waveform Cross-Correlation and Satellite Imagery to Identify Repeating Mine Blasts in Eastern Kazakhstan
Jonathan K. MacCarthy,
Hans Hartse,
Mary Greene, and
Charlotte Rowe
New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology
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INTRODUCTION
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The estimation of earthquake occurrence rates and seismic hazard analyses,
along with treaty verification requirements to identify and characterize
seismic sources in particular regions, requires removing mine blasts from
seismic catalogs (Mackey et al.
2003). While efforts progress to formulate generalized
discriminants based solely on seismic data, these efforts are often hampered
by poor data quality and a significant need for custom processing due to the
widely ranging propagation characteristics of each region
(Hartse et al. 1997;
Taylor and Hartse 1998;
Stump et al. 2002).
Many regions of interest to researchers and to the treaty verification
community are sparsely instrumented, geologically complex, and contain both
natural and anthropogenic seismicity.
A number of temporal methods have been used to detect and remove
anthropogenic seismicity from seismic catalogs; many of these rely on
earthquake metadata such as epicenter location and depth, the quality of which
may be poor. Mackey et al.
(2003) performed simple
time-of-day analysis on events from a number of Russian regional catalogs,
including the annual Earthquakes of the USSR catalog. By
investigating regions with local daytime seismicity greater than 65%, several
areas of industrial seismic contamination were identified. Wiemer and Baer
(2000) mapped normalized
daytime to nighttime ratio of events, Rq, and calculated the
probability of occurrence within a tight spatial grid to remove likely mining
seismicity from catalogs in Switzerland and North America. This method was
successful at highlighting regions of anomalously high daytime seismicity and
removing those events, but it also removed a small percentage of tectonic
events, which occur with fairly even time distribution throughout the day.
Additionally, events with bulletin depths greater than 30 km were not
considered. Significant inaccuracies in depth or epicenter location may
inappropriately exclude industrial events from identification. Relatively
straightforward . . . [Full Text of this Article]
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Department of
Earth and Environmental Science
801 Leroy Place, MSEC 208
Socorro, New
Mexico 87801
USA
jkmacc@nmt.com
(J.
K. M.)
Copyright © 2008 by Seismological Society of America