Potential capability of the East African seismic stations

Abstract

It is well known that Africa is poorly covered with seismic stations and relatively few readings reach the international data bases. In September 1993 a workshop was held in Dar es Salaam, where all available seismograms for the months November and December 1992 from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe were analyzed. A bulletin was prepared for the 2 months of data containing 645 events of which 222 were reported as teleseisms and the rest as regional events. Seventy events had more than three stations reporting and were located within the area, mostly in central East Africa. For the same time period, PDE has five events reported in central East Africa, and it seems that the local stations can lower the detection threshold from about magnitude 4.6 to 4.0. The existing networks in East Africa thus have a large potential for increasing the quantity and quality of data available to the seismic community, and the workshop showed that it is very important to cooperate on a regional basis to achieve this.