What are today's methods in calculating the Local Magnitude of earthquakes?

Question

I'm no expert and barely have any idea about this. But I want to know if the methods in calculating the Local Magnitude can only be done manually? I mean manually by first reading a seismograph, identifying the distance of the epicenter using the distance between P-S waves, and then measuring the height of the highest amplitude. Or are there software, APIs, and etc that can do this automatically by just providing the seismograph data. Or there's no way to calculate the Local Magnitude without a human input?

Paul Goyes · Answer

According to the equation for local magnitude calculation I give my answer: Of course there is a lot of algorithms for auto-picking, in fact, the magnitude value that you see in the first report (immediately) after an earthquake is (almost always) an automatic calculation. https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/199/1/368/731808. However, the P and S picked time is checked but humans in order to improve the accuracy. I think the human verification is always necessary and obligatory, because some earthquake are complex signals. seismogram showing some complex earthquake signal logs in Colombia !. Moreover, the point here is not the human-based method, I thing it should be focused on the quality control system.

Answered by Paul Goyes on September 25, 2021

What are today's methods in calculating the Local Magnitude of earthquakes?

One Answer

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question