Magnitude Estimation: Trial 1

The target was set to estimate magnitude using 10 seconds of data after the event occurred. Since in 10 seconds, wave can only travel 50 km, it made sense to consider only stations within 50 KM radius of the epicenter.

Just like a pick, it doesn’t make much sense to consider each sensor as a Seismogram and calculate Richter Scale magnitude from it, since each and every sensor will have different bias and noise levels, and each sensor in array would give different reading for same earthquake. This is proven by the plot below:

Not quite wanted ? Right ?

Notice that the estimations are way off the mark and are all over the map, while we expected them to along y = x line.

Instead we have advantage of numbers; we should look at the measures of central tendency.