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Digitizing analog seismograms of Iranian seismic stations — preserving records for strong earthquakes in Iran 1960–1990

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Abstract

To preserve the analog records of historical earthquakes which occurred in and around Iran in digital form and to make them available for modern analysis techniques that require waveforms, we decided to digitize seismograms of destructive earthquakes that occurred between 1960 and 1990. The seismograms have been recorded at five seismic stations deployed in Tehran, Mashhad, Kermanshah, Tabriz, and Shiraz by the Institute of Geophysics of the University of Tehran (IGUT). The restoration project of the old analog seismograms archived in the IGUT started in 2018. Seismograms were sorted by station and date to create a hardcopy databank, and then those from large earthquakes and their larger aftershocks were chosen for the scanning process. Seismograms of 52 significant earthquakes and their aftershocks with magnitudes greater than 5.0 that occurred in and around Iran were scanned. Besides that, seismograms of several significant and huge teleseismic earthquakes that occurred between 1960 and 1990 were scanned. At present, almost 600 scanned seismograms are available. The current digitization process in IGUT is done manually and is based on waveform vectorization. The provided databank is one of the most important sources of information for research in seismology and active tectonics in and around Iran.

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Data availability

The seismograms that support the finding of this study are freely available on demand at seismology division of Institute of Geophysics of University of Tehran, https://geophysics.ut.ac.ir/en/%D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%B4-%D9%BE%DA%98%D9%88%D9%87%D8%B4%DB%8C-%D8%B2%D9%84%D8%B2%D9%84%D9%87-%D8%B4%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B3%DB%8C or send an email to: Mahdy.Aghajani@ut.ac.ir.

In addition, the source codes used in this study are available for downloading at the link: https://github.com/hosseinahmadi1/digitizing-seismograms, and the name of the code/library is: digitizing-seismograms. Program language: MATLAB, Software required: Windows 10 and MATLAB 2015 and upper, Program size: 64 KB.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the editors and the anonymous reviewers and of the Journal of Seismology for their valuable feedback and constructive criticism, which greatly contributed to the improvement of this article. The authors would like to thank the seismology research division of IGUT for their technical assistance. Special thanks go to Dr. Jochen Braunmiller of the University of South Florida for his helpful suggestions, I would also want to thank Behzad Boroumand from IGUT for his assistance and time in sketching Fig. 1a, as well as my friend Saeed Rahimzadeh for his help in drawing Fig. 1b.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Mahdy Aghajani, Hossein Ahmadi & Noorbakhsh Mirzaei

  2. Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia, Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Batllo

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  1. Mahdy Aghajani
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  2. Hossein Ahmadi
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  3. Noorbakhsh Mirzaei
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Contributions

MA: author 1 designer and coordinator of the project, makes main contributions to the development of ideas, wrote the manuscript.

HA: author 1 the implementation of ideas, designed the computational framework and analyzed the data and performed the calculations, the conception of experiments.

NM: author 2 participates in drafting and critically revising the manuscript and takes intellectual responsibility for its content.

JB: author 2 verified the analytical methods and critically revising the manuscript and takes intellectual responsibility for its content.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mahdy Aghajani.

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Hereby, I, Mahdy Aghajani, consciously assure that the manuscript “Digitizing analog seismograms of Iranian seismic stations—preserving records for strong earthquakes in Iran 1960–1990” does not involve the use of animal or human data or tissue and the following is fulfilled:

(1) This study is the authors’ own original work, which has not been previously published elsewhere.

(2) The paper is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.

(3) The paper reflects the authors’ own research and analysis in a truthful and complete manner.

(4) The paper properly credits the meaningful contributions of co-authors and co-researchers.

(5) The results are appropriately placed in the context of prior and existing research.

(6) All sources used are properly disclosed.

(7) All authors have been personally and actively involved in substantial work leading to the paper, and will take public responsibility for its content.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Highlights

• Reliability of manual digitization against automated for large earthquakes and converting scanned images to statistic table in MATLAB.

• Applying curvature correction on account of the analog nature of the instrument.

• Creating a manual digitization algorithm to eliminate crossing in large earthquakes.

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Aghajani, M., Ahmadi, H., Mirzaei, N. et al. Digitizing analog seismograms of Iranian seismic stations — preserving records for strong earthquakes in Iran 1960–1990. J Seismol 27, 693–706 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-023-10158-4

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