Travel time source-specific station corrections related to lithospheric structures in the Mediterranean

We compare the locations obtained from arrival times collected by the International Seismological Centre from a network of regional and teleseismic stations for a cluster of Italian earthquakes with the locations of the same events obtained by the dense national seismic network operated by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia. We find mislocations on the order of 15 km for epicentral coordinates and on the order of 25 km for depths calculated from the regional and teleseismic network and using the standard IASP91 travel times. These mislocations are generally larger than the sizes of the respective error ellipse semi-axes. We then show that systematic shifts of hypocentral coordinates can be substantially reduced by applying source-specific station corrections. Moreover, we find that the size of error ellipses characterizing the teleseismic locations is significantly reduced by the application of such corrections. Our travel time corrections are compared and found fairly consistent with information available in the literature on tomographic studies on the crust and upper mantle in the European-Mediterranean region.Published3-194T. Sismologia, geofisica e geologia per l'ingegneria sismicaJCR Journa