Centennial Earthquake Catalog

README.txt - description of file content
CENT.CAT - catalog with all available magnitudes
CENT.MAG- catalog with preferred, corrected magnitude
plate15.pdf - color plate 15 of Engdahl and Villaseñor (2002)
plate16.pdf - color plate 16 of Engdahl and Villaseñor (2002)

The Centennial Catalog (Engdahl and Villaseñor, 2000) is a global catalog of locations and magnitudes of instrumentally recorded earthquakes. It currently extends from 1900 to 1999, but it is being periodically updated as new arrival time data for recent years become available.

This is a catalog of large earthquakes, created with the purpose of giving a realistic picture of the seismicity distribution in the Earth. It has been assembled by combining existing catalogs, reducing all available magnitudes for each earthquake to a common, corrected magnitude (same magnitudes as List of Significant World-wide Earthquakes:"Magnitudes of Significant Earthquakes"), and relocating the earthquakes with available arrival time data.

For recent years (1964–present) a cut-off magnitude of 5.5 has been chosen for the catalog, and the catalog is complete down to that threshold for the period prior to 1964 (also referred to as "historical instrumental" or simply "historical" period) the cut-off considered is magnitude 6.5. Between the 1930's and 1963 the catalog is complete to the magnitude 6.5 threshold, but prior to that, the catalog is only complete down to magnitude 7.0.

Another important feature of the catalog is that most of the earthquakes (those with available arrival time data in digital form) have been relocated using the same locations method (EHB: Engdahl, van der Hilst and Buland, 1998) which features more accurate travel time tables and procedures for better determination of the focal depths.

REFERENCES

Engdahl, E.R., and A. Villaseñor, Global Seismicity: 1900–1999, in W.H.K. Lee, H. Kanamori, P.C. Jennings, and C. Kisslinger (editors), International Handbook of Earthquake and Engineering Seismology, Part A, Chapter 41, pp. 665–690, Academic Press, 2002.

Engdahl, E.R., R. van der Hilst, and R. Buland, Global teleseismic earthquake relocation with improved travel times and procedures for depth determination, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am. 88, 722–743, 1998.