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EARTHQUAKE ›› 2010, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (3): 13-29.

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Sensitivity Tests for Teleseismic Body Wave Finite Fault Inversion and its Application to the Wenchuan Earthquake

WEI1, Sheng-ji, NI Si-dao1**, Ozgun Konca2, Don Helmberger2, CHEN Yong1   

  1. 1. Department of Earth and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China;
    2. Seismolab Caltech, CA 91125, USA
  • Received:2009-06-16 Revised:2009-12-27 Published:2021-10-18

Abstract: We present a series of rupture models of the Wenchuan MW7.9 earthquake based on inverting P and SH teleseismic body waves. A simulated annealing algorithm is used to determine the finite-fault model that minimizes the objective function described in terms of wavelet coefficients. With this approach, we can simultaneously invert for the slip amplitude, slip direction, rise time and rupture velocity. At the first step, experiments conducted on synthetic data are used to assess the ability to recover rupture slip details and teleseismic body waves. We investigate the resolvability of teleseismic body inversion on dip angle, rupture velocity and maximum rupture depth. Then 4 slip models are obtained for the Wenchuan earthquake by applying this method on 4 single fault planes which are specified by different dip angle. We analysis the resolvability of finite fault analysis by using telesesimic data and how to choose a reasonable dip angle for the Wenchuan earthquake. Two asperities are observed on different solutions, and likelihood of change dip is discussed. Incremental improvements in resolving for source complexity will be possible in the near future with more geodetic data and near field seismic data combined with space-based observations.

Key words: Wenchuan earthquake, Finite fault inversion, Waveform modeling

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