Seismic Location Calibration of the European Arctic

A crustal velocity model has been developed for Fennoscandia, the Baltic shield and adjacent areas. This model represents a simplified average of various models developed for parts of this region. We show that P-wave travel times calculated with this model provide an excellent fit to observations at the Fennoscandian, KRSC and IRIS station networks for a set of seismic events with known or very well-constrained locations. The station-event paths cover large parts of Western Russia and the Barents Sea, thus indicating that this model, which we denote the Barents model, is appropriate for this entire region. We show by examples that significant improvements in event location precision can be achieved compared to using the IASPEI model. We finally use the Barents model to calculate locations of recent small seismic events in the Novaya Zemlya region of interest in a CTBT monitoring context.