The collection of seismic station readings
The chief problem of the International Seismological Centre in Edinburgh is to determine focal parameters of seismic events from a stream of station reports. These station reports are identifiable only by the arrival time of the seismic impulse at the given station, as the source location and tim e are not, in general, known when the readings are made. As several events may sometimes occur within a few minutes of each other, and as the P waves from each event may take up to 20 min to reach the points of detection, considerable overlapping is to be expected. One proposal, which will be discussed, is to set up a pattern of reference points covering the Earth, and to subtract the travel time between each reference point and the recording station from the arrival time given in the station report. Each subtraction yields an estimate of what the origin time would have been if the source had been located close to the reference point. If a source actually is close to one of the reference points, the apparent source times form a much sharper ‘bunch’ in a time series than do the arrival times from which they were derived. In addition to assisting recognition, the process yields a provisional epicentre and a set of first residuals and, as such, provides a favourable starting point for the following computations.