German Earthquake Catalogue

The database underlying the Web Map Service (WMS) provides information on seismic events in Germany and neighbouring areas. It includes the places where 800 seismic events have taken place since the year. The epicenter determination is based on historical sources and since the beginning of the instrumental earthquake recording in the 20th century measurements with seismometer stations. The digital data acquisition at the seismometer stations of the German Regional Network (GRSN) as well as the measurement systems of the GERES array and the Gräfenberg array (GRF) and the real-time acquisition of registered seismometer data to the central seismic observatory of the BGR today allows seismic events to be detected, evaluated and made available in the WMS. All events are displayed with a local magnitude ML 2.0 or higher. The epicentre is initially determined automatically. Therefore, in some cases, erroneous epicenter coordinates and overestimated magnitude values may occur. For this reason, the results of the automatic determination as part of a manual routine evaluation are usually checked and corrected the following working day.