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December 20, 2021

Patricia Martone

Tricia Martone

­­New Developments for Texas Seismological Network’s (TexNet) Earthquake Detection System

My name is Tricia Martone, and I work on the TexNet project. I participate in research efforts regarding seismic clusters of interest in the state. Currently, I am a part of the collaboration effort with industry, who have shared their proprietary seismic data with us to better understand the seismicity in the Mentone cluster in Western Texas. This cluster hosted a ML 4.9 in late March 2020, which is the largest earthquake that Texas has seen in decades. Using the additional, close, proprietary stations, other analysts and I have been able to improve existing earthquake locations by including those stations. I also have created an automatic earthquake detection system using both our public array and these additional close stations, which improves retroactive detection of small earthquakes in the cluster. This effort matters because detection and locations with complementary data in areas that we do not have access to deploy public stations can give us more information about the evolution and migration of seismicity in this area and the faults that host these earthquakes. Next steps for this project include using a local earth model to better improve the earthquake locations at depth. This collaboration effort has also involved undergraduate students at UT who are able to learn new skills and gain experience in seismology research.

TexNet station


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