Homogenizing instrumental earthquake catalogs – a case study around the Dead Sea Transform Fault Zone

The creation of a homogenized earthquake catalog is a fundamental step in seismic hazard analysis. The homogenization procedure, however, is complex and requires a good understanding of the heterogeneities among the available bulletins. Common events within the bulletins have to be identified and assigned with the most suitable origin time and location solution, while all the events have to be harmonized into a single magnitude scale. This process entails several decision variables that are usually defined using qualitative measures or expert opinion, without a clear exploration of the associated uncertainties. To address this issue, we present an automated and data-driven workflow that defines spatio-temporal margins within which duplicate events fall and converts the various reported magnitudes into a common scale. Special attention has been paid to the fitted functional form and the validity range of the derived magnitude conversion relations. The proposed methodology has been successfully applied to a wide region around the Dead Sea Transform Fault Zone (27N-36N, 31E-39E), with input data from various sources such as the International Seismological Centre and the Geophysical Institute of Israel. The produced public catalog contains more than 5500 events, between 1900 and 2017, with moment magnitude Mw above 3. The MATLAB/Python scripts used in this study are also available.