Resolving Rupture Directivity of Moderate Strike-Slip Earthquakes in Sparse Network with Ambient Noise Location: A Case Study with the 2011 M5.6 Oklahoma Earthquake

Abstract:

Earthquake rupture directivity is essential for improving reliability of shakemap and understanding seismogenic processes by resolving the ruptured fault. Compared with field geological survey and InSAR technique, rupture directivity analysis based on seismological data provides rapid characterization of the rupture finiteness parameters or is almost the only way for resolving ruptured fault for earthquakes weaker than M5.

In recent years, ambient seismic noise has been widely used in tomography and as well as earthquake location. Barmin et al. (2011) and Levshin et al. (2012) proposed to locate the epicenter by interpolating the estimated Green's functions (EGFs) determined by cross-correlation of ambient noise to arbitrary hypothetical event locations. This method does not rely on an earth model, but it requires a dense local array. Zhan et al. (2011) and Zeng et al. (2014) used the EGFs between a nearby station and remote stations as calibration for 3D velocity structure and then obtained the centroid location. In contrast, the hypocenter can be determined by P wave onsets. When assuming unilateral rupture, we can resolve the rupture directivity with relative location of the centroid location and hypocenter.

We apply this method to the 2011 M5.6 Oklahoma earthquake. One M4.8 foreshock and one M4+ aftershock are chosen as reference event to calibrate the systematic bias of ambient noise location. The resolved rupture plane strikes southwest-northeast, consistent with the spatial distribution of aftershocks (McNamara et al., 2015) and finite fault inversion result (Sun et al., 2014). This method works for unilaterally ruptured strike-slip earthquakes, and more case studies are needed to test its effectiveness.