The Advanced National Seismic System Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog

Date: 4/26/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Grand Ballroom

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a repository of earthquake bulletins and higher-level products such as earthquake slip models, “Did You Feel It?” reports, ShakeMaps, PAGER impact estimates, earthquake summary posters, and tectonic summaries. Together, this archive is known as the USGS Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) Comprehensive Catalog or “ComCat”. Over the past several years, an effort has been made to expand ComCat by integrating global and regional historic catalogs. The archive’s collection of hypocenter and magnitude information often with supporting phase arrival-time and amplitude measurements is extensive. Presently, ComCat contains information on about three million earthquakes. Data for global earthquakes are primarily from the ISC-GEM catalog and the USGS National Earthquake Information Center’s PDE bulletin that, in turn, contains contributions from many non-U.S. networks. The majority of the U.S. earthquakes are contributed by the USGS-supported ANSS regional seismic networks. In this presentation, we provide potential users with an overview of ComCat contents. We show how ComCat completeness evolves over time for different regions and summarize the contributions of the major contributing catalogs. We also present a description of the tools and semi-automated quality-control procedures developed to uncover errors including systematic magnitude biases, missing time periods, duplicate event postings, and incorrectly associated events. Finally, we discuss future development and design ideas that will continue to improve the quality and content of ComCat.

Presenting Author: Paul Earle

Authors