HR: 0800h
AN: S51B-0497 [Abstracts]
TI: Imaging source process of earthquakes from back-projection of high frequency seismograms
AU: * Pulido, N
EM: nelson@bosai.go.jp
AF: National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, 3-1 Tennodai,
Tsukuba, 3050006, Japan
AB:
Standard methodologies for calculation of the earthquakes source process, are based on inversion procedures
which require the calculation of complete source-stations Greens functions. On the other hand alternative
procedures have been developed in order to directly retrieve an image of the rupture process from high frequency
seismograms (Spudich et. al. 1984, Kao and Shan 2004, Ishii et. al. 2005). In this study we extend the Isochron-
Backprojection methodology (Festa et al., 2006), to image the source process of earthquakes, by incorporating
the use of high frequency seismograms around the source area. We take full advantage of the dense strong
motion networks available in Japan to model the source process of recent Japanese earthquakes.
The IBM method differs from conventional earthquake source inversion approaches, in that the calculation of
Green's functions is not required. The idea of the procedure is to directly back-project amplitudes of
seismograms envelopes around the source into a space image of the earthquake rupture (Pulido et al. 2007).
The method requires the calculation of theoretical travel times between a set of grids points distributed across
the fault plane, and every station. For this purpose and for simplicity we assume a multi-layered 1D model. All
travel times are adjusted by a station correction factor, calculated by taking the difference between observed and
theoretical travel times at each station. Next we calculate the rupture time of every grid within the fault plane by
assuming some arbitrary constant rupture velocity value, and obtain the isochrones distribution across the fault
plane by adding subfaults rupture times and the corresponding travel times for every station. We select
waveforms that have clear P and S wavelets, which means stations located approximately between 40 km and
100km from the epicenter. We extract P-wave windows between the origin time of the earthquake and the
theoretical arrival of the S-wave, and taper 1s of the waveforms at the end. We band-pass filter the data between
1Hz and 30Hz, and calculate the waveforms envelopes using the root-mean-square of the original waveforms
and their Hilbert transform. We calculate a grid "brigthness" by adding all the envelope amplitudes corresponding
to every grid isochron time for all stations. The final result is a distribution of the brightness across the fault
plane, which gives us an idea of the location of asperities within the fault plane.
We obtained an image of the source process of recent Japanese crustal earthquakes, by using data of the K-NET
and KiK-net strong motion networks operated by NIED, and applying the Isochrones Backprojection Method
(IBM). Our method has the capability to quickly map asperities of large earthquakes, and is able to provide stable
estimates of the fault rupture velocity. We investigate the resolution of our source models by exploring different
data sets as well as performing synthetic tests.
References
Festa, G., and A. Zollo, Geophys. J. Int.,166, 745-756, 2006.
Ishii, M., P. Shearer, H. Houston, and J. E. Vidale, Nature, 435, 933-936, 2005.
Kao, H., and S.J. Shan, Geophys. J. Int., 157, 589-594, 2004.
Pulido, N., S. Aoi, and H. Fujiwara, 2007. Rupture process of the 2007 Notohanto Earthquake by using an
Isochrones Back-projection Method and K-NET and KiK-net data, (submitted).
Spudich, P., and E. Cranswick, Bull. Seism. Soc. Am. 74, 2083-2114, 1984.
UR: http://www.j-
shis.bosai.go.jp/staff/nelson/index_e.html
DE: 7209 Earthquake dynamics (1242)
DE: 7212 Earthquake ground motions and engineering seismology
DE: 7215 Earthquake source observations (1240)
DE: 7290 Computational seismology
DE: 7294 Seismic instruments and networks (0935, 3025)
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting