Coseismic Deformation and Landslides Assosiated with Cinchona Earthquake, Mw 6.1, Costa Rica, Detected by ALOS/PALSAR

Abstract:

A shallow earthquake with magnitude 6.1 (Mw) occurred in Costa Rica, Central America, on 8 January 2009. This earthquake, called Cinchona earthquake, caused many landslides and around 20 fatalities. Alvarado (2009) reported that the area of landslides was concentrated in the northwestern part of the epicenter. To simulate the relationships between the location of landslides and acceleration, we detected landslides and coseismic deformation by using the ALOS/PALSAR radar image analyses. We first detected the coseismic deformation for ascending and descending tracks by InSAR analysis. The maximum coseismic Line of Sight (LOS) changes were around 20cm for both tracks. We derived the fault source model to explain the LOS changes, using elastic dislocation sources; the optimum geometry was inferred by trial-and-errors. The location of the fault model indicated that the source fault of this earthquake was the northern part of the Angel fault. We also detected the signal of landslides by pixel-offset techniques. The signal had larger amplitude in narrower area than coseismic deformation. The signal was placed on the same area reported by Alvarado (2009). As following the attenuation relationships for peak ground acceleration (Si and Midorikawa, 1999), we calculated the horizontal peak ground acceleration. The signal of landslides was concentrated in the area where the value of peak ground acceleration had larger than 450 gal.