High-quality revision of the Israeli seismic bulletin

Seismic bulletins, with trustworthy phase picks, origin times, and source locations are key for regional seismic studies, such as travel-time (TT) tomography, attenuation tomography, and anisotropy studies. To lay the groundwork for such studies in Israel, we revised the seismic bulletin of Israel and the surrounding area and obtained a trustworthy TT data set. From the earthquake and explosion bulletins of the Geophysical Institute of Israel, we compiled a starting data set of about 123,000 earthquakes and explosions that occurred during the past 40 yr. After screening out the poorly recorded events, we were left with a data set of ∼ 38; 000 well-recorded events. We then revised the remaining data set in two consecutive steps. In the first, we reviewed and updated station metadata, including changes in station metadata parameters over time. In the second step, we jointly relocated a list of selected seismic events, using the Bayesian hierarchical location software package (BayesLoc) of Myers et al. (2007) that performs joint relocation of multiple events. We observed striking dissimilarities between the spatial distributions of the newly relocated catalog and the initial locations. Although the depth distribution of the starting catalog is trimodal with peaks at 0, 5, and 10 km, the distribution in this study is unimodal, with a broad peak between 7.5 and 12.5 km. By differencing the observed arrival times and the origin times obtained through relocation with BayesLoc, we obtained a revised TT database that consists of 261,336 Pg, 132,876 Pn, 114,816 Sg, and 60,394 Sn arrivals, from a set of 30,458 jointly relocated seismic sources. We compared prerevision and postrevision TTs as a function of epicentral distance and concluded that the revised data set contains far fewer outliers and inconsistencies than the original data set. The revised TT data set may be used for seismic studies, such as TT tomography, attenuation tomography, and anisotropy studies.