NH23C-1900
Mexican Earthquakes and Tsunamis Catalog Reviewed

Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Rocio Castillo-Aja, UNAM, Posgrado en Geografia, Mexico City, Mexico and M. Teresa Ramirez-Herrera, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Instituto de Geografía, D.F., Mexico; University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States
Abstract:
Today the availability of information on the internet makes online catalogs very easy to access by both scholars and the public in general. The catalog in the "Significant Earthquake Database", managed by the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI formerly NCDC), NOAA, allows access by deploying tabular and cartographic data related to earthquakes and tsunamis contained in the database.

The NCEI catalog is the product of compiling previously existing catalogs, historical sources, newspapers, and scientific articles. Because NCEI catalog has a global coverage the information is not homogeneous. Existence of historical information depends on the presence of people in places where the disaster occurred, and that the permanence of the description is preserved in documents and oral tradition. In the case of instrumental data, their availability depends on the distribution and quality of seismic stations. Therefore, the availability of information for the first half of 20th century can be improved by careful analysis of the available information and by searching and resolving inconsistencies.

This study shows the advances we made in upgrading and refining data for the earthquake and tsunami catalog of Mexico since 1500 CE until today, presented in the format of table and map. Data analysis allowed us to identify the following sources of error in the location of the epicenters in existing catalogs:

• Incorrect coordinate entry

• Place name erroneous or mistaken

• Too general data that makes difficult to locate the epicenter, mainly for older earthquakes

• Inconsistency of earthquakes and the tsunami occurrence: earthquake's epicenter located too far inland reported as tsunamigenic.

The process of completing the catalogs directly depends on the availability of information; as new archives are opened for inspection, there are more opportunities to complete the history of large earthquakes and tsunamis in Mexico. Here, we also present new earthquake and tsunami findings that, so far, we have achieved.

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