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Composite focal mechanisms

The groups obtained by the amplitude correlation contain closely located events with very similar radiation patterns. This suggests that we could calculate a well constrained, composite focal mechanism for the events by stacking amplitude and polarity observations. The focal mechanism thus obtained would give more accurate information about the nodal plane orientations and slip directions, however, the dynamical parameters would be a mere average of the events in the group. We implemented an algorithm that normalizes the amplitudes of the individual earthquakes to the median amplitude for the event. These normalized amplitudes are then stacked, for each phase on all available stations, and the the final result is renormalized with the median of the event medians. Polarities are stacked at each station and the median polarity used as the correct one at the station. In our test group the composite mechanism was calculated from amplitudes at 11 stations and using seven polarities, to be compared to the individual events median of eight stations and two polarities. This work is still in progress but preliminary results show that the optimal fault plane solution obtained from the composite event show very good agreement with the estimate of the fault plane orientation from relative location.


next up previous
Next: Preprocessing stress tensor inversion Up: Spectral amplitude correlation Previous: Spectral amplitude correlation
Margret Asgeirsdottir
1999-12-21