Development of North Caucasus Seismological Observational System

The Caucasus region is one of the three most earthquake-hazardous regions of the Russian Federation, along with the Far East and South Siberia. Strong earthquakes with intensity 8 or 9 (according to MSK-64 scale) are possible in some zones of the North Caucasus. If take in to account the seismic risk, the western part of North Caucasian region will be the most hazardous region in Russian, because the high population density is combined with the large number of different important objects. Therefore seismological monitoring of the North Caucasus becomes essential to ensure the seismic safety of the region.

The XXII Winter Olympic Games holding in Sochi in 2014 gave the impact for the development of a network of stations in the western part of the North Caucasus. Only 3 seismic stations (Anapa, Gelendzhik and Sochi) have been on the Black Sea coast area in 2008. To the end of 2013 the regional network of 10 modern digital stations has been installed in the Greater Sochi area. The new seismic stations - Agoi, Tuapse, Fischt, Lazarevskoe, Guzeripl, Laura, Estosadok, Olympic Park and Aibga - were added. The installation of new seismological equipment upgraded the capability of the system of seismological observations. It has become possible to implement the monitoring of seismic events since the magnitude level M ≥ 1.0.

The dense seismic network has allowed to implement an automated system for processing data in near real time. The operated system of automated data processing is based on the SeisComP3 software platform. The investigation of the real sensitivity of the created network for registration of regional earthquakes was carried out.

Earthquake catalog for western part of the North Caucasus including more than 100 earthquakes with magnitudes ML in the range from 1.5 to 5.0 was generated during 2 year period of automatic processing. The catalog has been used to evaluate the performance of the monitoring system.