A study of body-to-surface wave conversion associated with deep earthquakes

Abstract:

Understanding converted surface waves is helpful because they could improve the accuracy of earthquake location if the exacted scattered point is known as well as serve to image shallow structures with dispersion features. Previous studies have reported a few observations of body-to-surface-wave conversion associated with deep earthquakes. For example, Wagner and Langston used coda intensity analysis and f-k analysis to confirm a P-to-Rg wave and performed forward modeling with T-matrix method demonstrating that a 1km relief was responsible for the observed body-to-surface wave scattering. Moreover, Furumura et al. observed unusual Rayleigh waves converted from S wave observed at Australia with deep earthquakes occurred along Kermadec-Tonga trench and a 2D Pseudospetral method is adopted to illustrate that the Rayleigh waves could be explained by ridge structures.

Both T-matrix and pseudospetral algorithms are based on numerical methods. However, we lack a theory to study the mechanism of those surface waves quantitatively. For instance, the relationship between the topography with the dominate frequency of converted surface waves could be resolved thoroughly with a theoretical approach. From this perspective, we carried out a theoretical method to calculate the converted Rayleigh wave with surface topography. During the calculation, a homogeneous half space medium is assumed and the path of the converted phase is divided into two segments.

Firstly, we will introduce our theoretical method in detail and a comparison of our results and SEM results will be presented to verify our methods. Secondly, the topography effect and the transfer efficiency of P and S wave will be examined quantitatively with different source mechanisms. Then, we will report an observation of unusual large amplitude surface waves transferred from body waves at local stations. Our preliminary result shows that those anomalous waves are identified as Rayleigh wave and are probably generated by the steep topography. In the end, we will discuss the algorithm’s extension, such as calculating the converted Love wave, and its shortage since a plane wave approximation is applied in the calculation.