INVERSION OF SEISMOLOGICAL DATA USING A CONTROLLED RANDOM SEARCH GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUE

Inversion problems in seismology deal with the estimation of the location and the time of occurrence of an earthquake from observations of the arrival time of the body waves. These problems can be regarded as non-linear optimization problems in which the objective function to be minimized is the discrepancy between the recorded arrival times and the calculated arrival times at a prescribed set of observation stations, as a function of the hypocentral parameters and the wave speed structure of the Earth. The objective of the present paper is to demonstrate the effectiveness of a controlled random search algorithm of global optimization (Shanker and Mohan, 1987; Mohan and Shanker, 1988) in solving such types of inversion problems. The performance of the algorithm has been tested on earthquake arrival time data of earthquakes recorded in the vicinity of local networks in the Garhwal Kumaon region of the Himalayas.