The Haouz cluster is named for Al Haouz Province in central Morocco. The
cluster is based on the destructive 6.8 Mw earthquake on September 8,
2023 and consists mainly of the mainshock and larger aftershocks. The
aftershock sequence was very active but no events with magnitude greater
than 4.9 were reported. As a result the cluster contains only a modest
number of teleseismic observations. All events were recorded to
far-regional distances, however. The station distribution for location
calibration is fairly good, but it has an azimuthal gap to the NNW that
causes the confidence ellipse for the hypocentroid to be elongated in
that direction. All events have depth control, mainly from near-source
and local-distance readings, but the mainshock and two of the larger
aftershocks have depth control from teleseismic depth phases as well.
Both the local distance phase arrivals and the depth phases place the
mainshock focus unusually deep, around 25 km, consistent with the
identification of the steeply north-dipping nodal plane of the focal
mechanism as the fault plane, and with the depth range of faulting in
the finite fault model published by the NEIC.
