Banat region is one of the most active zones in terms of crustal seismicity in Romania. Even though the active seismic monitoring started from early XXth century, the data sets got more performant with the development and expansion of the seismic network monitoring in the late 1970’s. One particularity regarding seismic data acquisition is that in many cases anthropic activity, such as mining and quarry exploitation, interferes with natural seismicity. Our aim is to bring forward a series of data extracted from the ROMPLUS catalogue to identify the anthropic interference. To this we propose a method based on multiple discrimination criteria, such as local time of event occurrence, magnitude, location in respect with the nearest exploitation site, depth and P-wave input analysis (polarity and waveform). Identifying and filtering the anthropic events from the catalogue will result in a better imaging and characterizing of the natural seismic phenomenon in Banat region improving this way the regional seismic hazard assessment.
Abstract. After the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2019, Romania followed the example of many other countries and imposed a series of restrictive measures, including restricting people's mobility and closing social, cultural and industrial activities to prevent the spread of the disease. In this study, we analyze continuous vertical component recordings from the stations of the Romanian Seismic Network – one of the largest networks in Europe containing 148 stations – to explore in detail the seismic noise variation associated with the reduced human mobility and activity in Romania due to COVID-19. We focused our investigation on four frequency bands – 2–8 Hz, 4–14 Hz, 15–25 Hz and 25–40 Hz – and found that the largest reductions in seismic noise associated with the lockdown corresponds to the high frequency range, from 15 to 40 Hz. We found that all the stations with large reductions in seismic noise (> ~40 %) are located inside and near schools or in buildings, indicating that at these frequencies the drop is related to the drastic reduction of human activity in these edificies. In the lower frequency range (2–8 Hz and 4–14 Hz) the variability of the noise reduction among the stations is lower than in the high frequency range, and the noise level is reduced by up to 35 %. This drop is due to reduced traffic during the lockdown, as most of the stations showing such changes in seismic noise in these bands are located within cities, near main or side streets. In addition to the noise reduction observed at stations located in populated areas, we also found seismic noise lockdown-related changes at several stations located far from urban areas, with movement of people in the vicinity of the station explaining the noise reductions. Apart from the opportunity to investigate in more detail the seismic noise characteristics due to human mobility and activity, we show that noise reduction during the lockdown has also improved the earthquake detection capability of the accelerometers located in noisy urban environments.
<p>Seismic activity in Romania is dominated by the intermediate-depth earthquakes generated inside the seismogenic body of the Vrancea seismic zone extending to the depth of 180 km. This earthquakes represent the main source of seismic hazard for Romania and neighbouring countries, with the most recent largest events of M 7.7 and 7.4 in 1940 and 1977 that caused significant and widespread destruction. Space distribution of the intermediate-depth earthquakes from Vrancea is constrained to a compact volume (60-180 km in depth and 20x50 km areal extent) falling into the category of, so called, &#8220;seismic nests&#8221;, which have peculiar and not well understood seismogenic mechanisms.</p><p>We present first results obtained by applying the automated waveform analysis schemes to the detection, location and characterization of seismicity from the Vrancea zone to the continuous data recorded at seismic stations of the Romanian seismic network. We evaluate the performance of the methods like network-based full-waveform coherency earthquake detection and location and the template-based waveform similarity analysis for building a detailed view of seismic activity in space and time and to provide a fully automated workflow for continuous seismic data analysis. We use case-specific, for Vrancea seismic region, synthetic example to test the detection and location scheme setup and resolution. The real dataset of continuous seismic data focuses on the two month time period around the recent, moderate (M 5.6) December 27, 2016 earthquake.</p><p>The preliminary results of the automated detection and location analysis indicate reduced foreshock and aftershock activity for this event. According to the Romanian earthquake catalog, this appears to be a common pattern for moderate (M ~5.0-6.0) magnitude events. We also discuss the results of the template-based waveform similarity analysis for the detected and located events, as well as how the combination of the two methods can contribute to the enhanced seismic monitoring and hazard assessment.</p>
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