About me

Zoltán Wéber - Introduction

I am a senior researcher at the Kövesligethy Radó Seismological Observatory in Budapest, Hungary.

I am mostly interested in seismological inverse problems: both in developing new methods and techniques and in using well-developed inversion procedures to get as much as possible out of the measured data.

The Pannonian basin, where Hungary resides, is an extensional back-arc basin in central Europe with fairly complicated geological structure. Finding out the details of this structure is essential in order to understand the formation, evolution and recent state of the basin. This aim inspired me to tomographically image the P-wave velocity distribution in the earth crust and upper mantle beneath the Pannonian region. I have also developed some new techniques usable in solving seismological tomographic problems.

Investigating seismicity is also an important tool to understand the recent tectonic features of a selected area. Hungary can be characterized by moderate seismicity with local earthquake magnitudes of mostly less than 3. Determination of mechanisms of weak local events is of prime interest while monitoring local seismicity, because they reflect the stress pattern acting in the area under study and may help to map even its small-scale tectonic structure. Recently I have developed a waveform inversion procedure in order to retrieve the hypocentral locations and source mechanisms (moment tensors) of weak local earthquakes. By this method I have succeeded in determining the focal mechanisms of so weak Hungarian events, for which the "classical" inversion of first-motion polarity data could not produce reliable solutions.

My detailed curriculum vitae and publication list may help you to find out more about my scientific activities.