Discrimination of Man-Made Events and Tectonic Earthquakes in Utah Using Data Recorded at Local Distances

Seismic event discrimination methods exploit the differing characteristics—in terms of amplitude and/or frequency content—of the generated seismic phases among the event types to be classified. Most of the commonly used seismic discrimination methods are designed for regional data recorded at distances of about 200 to 2000 km. Relatively little attention has focused on discriminants for local distances (< 200 km), the range at which the smallest events are recorded. Short-period fundamental mode Rayleigh waves (Rg) are commonly observed on seismograms of man-made seismic events, and shallow, naturally occurring tectonic earthquakes recorded at local distances. We leverage the well-known notion that Rg amplitude decreases dramatically with increasing event depth to propose a new depth discriminant based on Rg-to-Sg spectral amplitude ratios. The approach is successfully used to discriminate shallow events from deeper tectonic earthquakes in the Utah region recorded at local distances (< 150 km) by the University of Utah Seismographic Stations (UUSS) regional seismic network. Using Mood's median test, we obtained probabilities of nearly zero that the median Rg-to-Sg spectral amplitude ratios are the same between shallow events on one side (including both shallow tectonic earthquakes and man-made events), and deeper earthquakes on the other side, suggesting that there is a statistically significant difference in the estimated Rg-to-Sg ratios between the two populations. We also observed consistent disparities between the different types of shallow events (e.g., explosions vs. mining-induced events), implying that it may be possible to separate the sub-populations that make up this group. This suggests that using local distance Rg-to-Sg spectral amplitude ratios one can not only discriminate shallow from deeper events, but may also be able to discriminate different populations of shallow events. We also experimented with Pg-to-Sg amplitude ratios in multi-frequency linear discriminant functions to classify man-made events and tectonic earthquakes in Utah. Initial results are very promising, showing probabilities of misclassification of only 2.4-14.3%.