The auxiliary function method for waveform based earthquake location

Abstract

This paper introduces the auxiliary function method (AFM), a novel, fast and simple approach for waveform based earthquake location. From any initial hypocenter and origin time, we can construct the auxiliary function, whose zero set contains the real earthquake hypocenter and the origin time. In most of situations, there are very few elements in this set. The overall computational cost of the AFM is significantly less than that of the iterative methods. According to our numerical tests, even for large noise, the method can still achieve good location results. These allow us to determine the earthquake hypocenter and the origin time extremely fast and accurate.