High-resolution seismicity catalog of Italian peninsula in the period 1981-2015

In order to provide an updated reference catalog of Italian seismicity, the absolute location of the last 35 years (1981-2015) of seismic activity was computed with a three-dimensional VP and VS velocity model covering the whole Italian territory. The NonLinLoc code (Lomax et al., 2000), which is based on a probabilistic approach, was used to provide a complete and robust description of the uncertainties associated to the locations corresponding to the hypocentral solutions with the highest probability density. Moreover, the code using a finite difference approximation of the eikonal equation (Podvin and Lecomte, 1991), allows to manage very contrasted velocity models in the arrival time computation. To optimize the earthquakes location, we included the station corrections in the inverse problem. For each year, the number of available earthquakes depends on both the network detection capability and the occurrence of major seismic sequences. The starting earthquakes catalog was based on 2.6 million P and 1.9 million S arrival time picks for 278.607 selected earthquakes, recorded at least by 3 seismic stations of the Italian seismic network. The new catalog compared to the previous ones consisting of hypocentral locations retrieved with linearized location methods, shows a very good improvement as testified by the location parameters assessing the quality of the solution (i.e., RMS, azimuthal gap, formal error on horizontal and vertical components). In addition, we used the distance between the expected and the maximum likelihood hypocenter location to establish the unimodal (high-resolved location) or multimodal (poor-resolved location) character of the probability distribution. We used these parameters to classify the resulting locations in four classes (A, B, C and D) considering the simultaneous goodness of the previous parameters. The upper classes (A and B) include the 65% of the relocated earthquake, while the lowest class (D) only includes the 7% of the seismicity. We present the new catalog, consisting of 272.847 events, showing some example of earthquakes location related to the background as well as small to large seismic sequences occurred in Italy the last 35 years.