Extraction of Broadband Basin-Scale Green's Functions from the Ambient Seismic Field

Abstract:

Many large cities in the world, including Tokyo and Los Angeles, are located atop sedimentary basins that have the potential to significantly amplify ground motions. The Kanto sedimentary basin, which underlies the Tokyo Metropolitan area, is filled by soft sediments and has a resonance period of 7-10 s, similar to the natural period of some tall buildings. To assess seismic hazard in this particularly seismically active area, we use the information carried by the ambient seismic field continuously recorded by more than 600 seismic stations that have been deployed in the basin. These stations equipped with three-component seismometers are a part of different networks, including the Metropolitan Seismic Observation network (MeSO-net), Hi-net and F-net of NIED, and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) network. We extracted the 9 components of the Green's function tensors from the ambient seismic field using deconvolution for each pair of stations, regarding one as the virtual source and the other one as the receiver. We show that the extracted Green's functions contain body and surface waves having phase and amplification similar to the ones of earthquake records that occurred close to the virtual sources. For inter-station distances shorter than 30 km, time-frequency analyses suggest that Green's functions with energy higher than 1 Hz can be recovered. We use this dense array to investigate the effect of inter-station distance variations and azimuth dependences on the Green's function retrieval. Results show that the ambient seismic field recorded by stations situated at less than a few kilometers from each other can provide insights on seismic hazard assessment over a broad period range.