Station Corrections for the Katmai Region Seismic Network

Introduction

Most procedures for routinely locating earthquake hypocenters within a local network are constrained to using laterally homogeneous velocity models to represent the Earth's crustal velocity structure. As a result, earthquake location errors may arise due to actual lateral variations in the Earth's velocity structure. Station corrections can be used to compensate for heterogeneous velocity structure near individual stations (Douglas, 1967; Pujol, 1988). The HYPOELLIPSE program (Lahr, 1999) used by the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) to locate earthquakes in Cook Inlet and the Aleutian Islands is a robust and efficient program that uses one-dimensional velocity models to determine hypocenters of local and regional earthquakes. This program does have the capability of utilizing station corrections within it's earthquake location proceedure. The velocity structures of Cook Inlet and Aleutian volcanoes very likely contain laterally varying heterogeneities. For this reason, the accuracy of earthquake locations in these areas will benefit from the determination and addition of station corrections. In this study, I determine corrections for each station in the Katmai region. The Katmai region is defined to lie between latitudes 57.5 degrees North and 59.00 degrees north and longitudes -154.00 and -156.00 (see Figure 1) and includes Mount Katmai, Novarupta, Mount Martin, Mount Mageik, Snowy Mountain, Mount Trident, and Mount Griggs volcanoes. Station corrections were determined using the computer program VELEST (Kissling, 1994). VELEST inverts arrival time data for one-dimensional velocity models and station corrections using a joint hypocenter determination technique. VELEST can also be used to locate single events.

First posted October 30, 2003