Resumen de The earthquake activity of Israel: revisiting 30 years of local and regional seismic records along the dead sea transform
More than 15,000 seismic events were recorded by the Israel Seismic Network (ISN) during the past 30 years, at the vicinity of the Dead Sea fault (DSF) zone. During those years, locations were obtained using several velocity models, which resulted in inconsistent locations. In addition, we found that seismicity is biased to very shallow depth estimations that do not match other estimations of more localized studies in the region. This study is focused on improving the regional earthquake catalog using robust single‐event location software (within the Antelope software), based on two seismic velocity models: (1) a local model (Gitterman et al., 2005) and (2) a global model (Kennett and Engdahl, 1991). The relocated events show more reasonable depth distributions, in accordance with the seismotectonic settings of the region, and the local velocity model shows smaller location errors than the global velocity model, suggesting better convergence of the location solutions. We also demonstrate and analyze the difference in the event‐station distribution, showing location effects of a sparse network, in which the main effect is seen for the focal depths: events located out of the network coverage tend to obtain a focal depth shallower than events located within the network coverage. The depth cross section along the DSF zone, within the boundaries of this study, presents a good correlation with previous estimation of the boundaries of the seismogenic zone, obtained by heat‐flow analysis. The relocated earthquake catalog is regarded as the new initial robust locations of the seismic bulletin of the ISN and considered as the basis for future studies and for more elaborated relocations; it is open to the public and can be downloaded from the Geological Survey of Israel website at https://www.gsi.gov.il (last accessed December 2015).
