Earthquake locations and seismic velocity models for Southern California

Earthquake locations are fundamental to studies of earthquake physics, fault orientations and Earth's deformation. Improving earthquake location accuracy has been an important goal branch in seismology for the past few decades. In this dissertation, I consider several methods to improve both relative and absolute earthquake locations. Chapter 2 is devoted to the comparison of different relative earthquake location techniques based on synthetic data, including the double-difference and source -specific station term (SSST) method. The shrinking box SSST algorithm not only provides similar improvements in relative earthquake locations compared to other techniques, but also improves absolute location accuracy compared to the simple SSST method. Chapter 4 describes and documents the COMPLOC software package for implementing the shrinking box SSST algorithm. Chapter 3 shows how absolute locations for quarry seismicity can be obtained by using remote sensing data, which is useful in providing absolute reference locations for three-dimensional velocity inversions and to constrain the shallow crustal structure in simultaneous earthquake location and velocity inversions. Chapter 5 presents and tests a method to estimate local Vp/Vs ratios for compact similar earthquake clusters using the precise P- and S- differential times obtained using waveform cross-correlation. Chapter 6 describes a new three-dimensional seismic velocity model for southern California obtained using the "composite event method" applied to the SIMULPS tomographic inversion algorithm. Based on this velocity model and waveform cross-correlation, Chapter 7 describes how a new earthquake location catalog is obtained for about 450,000 southern California earthquakes between 1981 and 200