Discrimination between earthquakes and quarry blasts in the Aswan region, southern Egypt using P-wave source spectra

Abstract

We analyzed 3,069 seismic signals from 413 events (112 explosions and 301 shallow earthquakes, depths < 5 km) recorded by the Aswan seismic sub-network in southern Egypt from 2010 to 2021 to discriminate between shallow earthquakes and quarrying activity. We investigated the spectral properties and related source parameters (e.g., seismic moment and corner frequency) using the estimated P-wave source spectra for both earthquakes and quarry blasts. The analysis showed that the P-wave source spectra of shallow earthquakes have higher corner frequencies (8.8–23 Hz) than quarry blasts (1.0–2.6 Hz) within the same magnitude range. The source spectra of quarry blasts exhibited significant misfits with the omega-square model and had steeper falloffs at high frequencies. The selected quarry blasts have a narrow seismic moment range, from 2.03⋅1011 to 1.35⋅1012 Nm. Our results demonstrate that the evaluation of misfit of P-wave spectra from the omega-square source model based on spectral amplitude characteristics of high and low frequency bands is the most reliable discriminant method in the routine data analysis of the target area.

The micro‐seismicity of Co. Donegal (Ireland): Defining baseline seismicity in a region of slow lithospheric deformation

“…Two distinct low‐frequency arrivals can be found in the coda of such kind of events (Figure 3b). These patterns are widely recognized in anthropic seismicity (Korrat et al., 2022) (Saadalla et al., 2023) and can be used to classify the artificial events. We also performed a comparative spectral analysis between a natural earthquake and an artificial seismic signal.…”