A FORTRAN Code for the Sensitivity Estimate of a Seismic Network: An Application to Campi Flegrei

Introduction:

Heat and power production is an attractive field that often collides with environmental aspect. Energy production is anyway so important that people are willing to accept even the pollution and drawbacks associated with it. The environmental impact monitoring is therefore fundamental to reduce the risks. In particular, the ground water quality and level, the eventual ground deformation and seismicity are the most important parameters to monitor. Usually, the States legislation provides instruction on the characteristic of the monitoring systems, especially for mining and geothermal exploitation. As the subsoil exploitation is often associated to micro-seismicity, the installation of a seismic network is an important tool and a cost to benefit analysis is usually required to deploy a network that meets certain specifications. 

The seismicity monitoring is useful both to understand the fluid movement in the underground and to plan the injection or pumping rate as a function of the seismicity occurrence. The sensitivity of anetwork to location or detection of earthquakes is a parameter that is always considered in the mandatory guidelines. The sensitivity of a seismic network is defined as the location performance of the network, i.e. the minimum magnitude of an earthquake that can be located using the records of the network itself. The detection performance of a network is, instead, the minimum magnitude for an earthquake to be detected by the network, i.e. the minimum magnitude of an earthquake that is visible at least on one seismogram of the recording network.