Estimation of Earthquake Source Properties Along the East African Rift Using Full Waveforms

Abstract:

Recently, the Continental Rifting in Africa: Fluids-Tectonic Interaction (CRAFTI) experiment was conducted in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya as a means to better evaluate the effect of tectonic and magmatic strain along the east African rift. Towards this goal S. Roecker has computed a 3D structural model by joint inversion of gravity, local seismic body wave, and surface wave data. The joint inversion in turn produces a quality estimate of the compressional, shear, and density structure in the region. In the process of tomography of local body wave data it was observed that there exist some anomalously deep seismic events. To better quantify these events we look towards waveform modeling in this new and laterally heterogeneous structural model. It is thought that better quantification of later arriving direct and scattered phases will provide better resolved estimates of the event locations and lower the trade-off between source time and depth uncertainty inherent in travel time inversions. Since our main objective is testing the validity of seismic depths in the travel time inversion we will favor a grid search based approach around the current hypocenters using a method similar Zhao, 2006. To expedite processing, we make use of seismic reciprocity and save the strain wave fields produced by impulsive sources at receiver locations in the vicinity of the initial hypocenters. We then perform a moment tensor inversion at each location around the hypocenter, estimate the corresponding source time function, compute the resulting synthetics, and finally calculate a cumulative waveform misfit objective function for all stations. It is thought this procedure should well sample the objective function in the neighborhood of the initial hypocenters and thereby provide an avenue for resolution analysis of the event depths.