On the Relation of Earthquake Stress Drop and Ground Motion Variability

Abstract:

The physical properties of the seismic source play a major role in the generation of earthquake ground motions. One of the key parameters typically used in this context is the so-called stress drop since it can be directly linked to the high-frequency spectral level of ground motion, and it is an important input parameter for ground motion modeling. At the same time, classically determined stress drop estimates from moment-corner frequency analysis have been shown to be extremely variable, and this to a much larger degree than might be expected from the decomposition of ground motion variability into its between-event and within-event components following the random effects approach (Cotton et al., 2013). This discrepancy raises the question of whether classically determined stress drop variability is too large, which would have significant implications for ground motion prediction in seismic hazard analysis.

We use the rich high-quality accelerometric databases available in Japan to derive non-parametric ground motion models on these data that serve as reference models. We then investigate the relation between the between-event terms for the individual earthquakes from these regressions with stress drop estimates determined nation-wide for crustal earthquakes. As a complement to the non-parametric models, we also apply a parametric mixed effects modeling approach to investigate the influence of between-event, between-region and between-sequence variability. The analysis is carried out for JMA equivalent seismic intensity, PGA and PGV data. Our results indicate a clear correlation of the between-event terms with stress drops estimates, both for non-parametric and parametric approaches – however with the interesting effect of the appearance of two major families of events with widely different stress drop, yet similar range of between-event terms. This effect is in agreement with the observation made by Cotton et al. (2013) that the between-event ground motion variability is significantly smaller than expected from the stress drop variability. Stress drop & ground motions also vary systematically between earthquake sequences.