Contamination of earthquake catalogues with anthropogenic events largely complicates
seismotectonic interpretation. It is especially true for relatively low seismicity
areas, such as Hungary. In the present study, we analyze the characteristics of earthquakes
and blasts of quarries occurred between 2015 and 2020 in the Mecsek Mountains in southern
Hungary within 120 km to MORH and KOVH stations.The objective of this study was to
determine the linear discrimination line between the two classes earthquakes and explosions.
We investigated the effectiveness of P/S amplitude ratios using filtered waveforms
at different ranges of frequencies. We applied waveform cross-correlation to build
correlation matrices at both stations and performed hierarchical cluster analysis
to identify event clusters. Because most of the quarry blasts were carried out by
ripple-fire technology, we computed spectrograms and examined the spectral ratio between
low and high frequencies and the steepness of spectra.Classes of earthquakes and quarry
blasts have separated well from each other by combining the amplitude ratio, waveform
similarity and the different spectral methods. We compare the discrimination parameters
and capability of both stations to identify the explosions in analyzed quarries that
were misclassified as earthquakes in the Hungarian National Bulletins.
