Abstract: A small aperture seismic array will be built in western China to increase earthquake monitoring ability of the northwest region of China. The correlation values of noises and signals recorded by the test array were calculated in the paper to find the best inter-sensor distance to monitor earthquakes. The research results implied that the inter-sensor distance of each two neighbor stations shouldn’t be longer than 500 m to fulfill the monitoring demand of regional events, the distances of station pairs should be 1500~2000 m to monitor the teleseismic events. At last, considering the survey array as the primary array to calculate the array response, the result was a narrow main lobe in the Northwest-Southeast direction, which showed that the narrow main lobe gave a higher slowness resolution for the event coming from this direction. Because of the L shape distribution, the array had a low resolution on azimuth, but could be improved by the correction appointing to a specific area. The appearance of many side lobes is due to the bigger inter-sensor distances of the test array.

Key words: Golmud seismic array, Correlation analysis, Array design