Source analysis of the March 7, 2019 $$\mathbf {M_L=4.0}$$ Somogyszob, Hungary earthquake sequence

Abstract

AbstractBetween February 16 and April 5, 2019, a series of earthquakes took place around the village of Somogyszob, Somogy county, Hungary. The mainshock occurred on March 7 with a local magnitude $$M_L=4.0$$ M L = 4.0 and epicentral intensity of 5 on the EMS scale. The main event was preceded by four foreshocks and followed by four aftershocks. The largest foreshock ($$M_L=2.6$$ M L = 2.6 ) was also felt with maximum intensity of 4 EMS. This earthquake sequence is the first remarkable one in the region that was recorded by a significant number of high-quality broadband digital seismographs. We have estimated the hypocenters of the 9 earthquakes using the hypoDD multiple-event location algorithm. The events occurred in a tight region around the mainshock at around 13–14 km depth. For the main event, we obtained an average moment magnitude of $$M_w=3.75$$ M w = 3.75 , source radii of $$r^P=509$$ r P = 509  m and $$r^S=400$$ r S = 400  m, and static stress drops of $$\varDelta \sigma ^P=1.19\times 10^6$$ Δ σ P = 1.19 × 10 6  Pa and $$\varDelta \sigma ^S=4.00\times 10^6$$ Δ σ S = 4.00 × 10 6  Pa from the analysis of displacement P- and S-wave spectra, respectively. The resulting spectral source parameters for the investigated events agree well with the results of earlier research. We have also shown that our recently developed probabilistic waveform inversion techniques applied in this study are suitable to retrieve the source mechanism for weak local earthquakes. We have successfully estimated the focal mechanism for the mainshock, a foreshock and an aftershock. Each earthquake was a thrust faulting event with a sub-horizontal P-axis pointing towards N-NE, coinciding with the general trend of the compressional stress field in the epicentral region.