The auxiliary function method for waveform based earthquake location

TL;DR

The paper presents the auxiliary function method (AFM), a fast and simple waveform-based earthquake location technique that efficiently identifies earthquake hypocenters and origin times with high accuracy, even in noisy conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces the AFM, a novel approach that reduces computational cost and improves speed and accuracy in earthquake location compared to traditional iterative methods.

Findings

AFM significantly reduces computational cost.

AFM achieves accurate earthquake locations even with high noise levels.

The method is fast and suitable for real-time earthquake monitoring.

Abstract

This paper introduces the auxiliary function method (AFM), a novel, fast and simple approach for waveform based earthquake location. From any initial hypocenter and origin time, we can construct the auxiliary function, whose zero set contains the real earthquake hypocenter and the origin time. In most of situations, there are very few elements in this set. The overall computational cost of the AFM is significantly less than that of the iterative methods. According to our numerical tests, even for large noise, the method can still achieve good location results. These allow us to determine the earthquake hypocenter and the origin time extremely fast and accurate.