On September 22, 2003, a M6.5 earthquake occurred in the Puerto Plata area, in the northern Dominican Republic. The earthquake was felt over most of the country and caused significant damage in the cities of Puerto Plata and Santiago. This event is the largest to occur in the Dominican Republic since a series of thrust events ranging from M6.1-8.1 struck the northeastern part of the country between 1943 and 1953.
The September 22 earthquake prompted the establishment of a 2-month temporary network of 10 broadband seismometers and a resurvey with GPS (Global Positioning System) instruments of a part of a geodetic network installed in the Dominican Republic in 1998. The main objectives of these deployments are to better characterize the source of the event and to determine whether it may have triggered slip on the nearby Septentrional fault.
This report presents the GPS campaign, the data collection scheme, the data analysis strategy, the preliminary results of coseismic displacements, and a tentative interpretation in terms of earthquake source parameters.