Systematic determination of earthquake rupture directivity and fault planes from analysis of long-period P-wave spectra

Abstract

If an earthquake has a primarily unilateral rupture, the pulse width observed on seismograms will vary depending on the angle between the rupture direction and the takeoff vector to the station. We have developed a method to estimate the amount of pulse broadening from the spectrum and apply it to a long-period database of large, globally distributed earthquakes that occurred between 1988 and 2000. We select vertical-component component P-waves at epicentral distances of 20°-98°. We compute the spectrum from a 64-s-long window around each P-wave arrival. Each spectrum is the product of source, receiver and propagation response functions as well as local source- and receiver-side effects. Since there are multiple receivers for each source and multiple sources for each receiver, we can estimate and remove the source- and receiverside terms by stacking the appropriate P log spectra. For earthquakes deeper than ∼200 km, source effects dominate the residual spectra. We use our pulse-width estimates to determine the best rupture direction and to identify which nodal plane of the Harvard centroid moment tensor (CMT) solution is most consistent with this rupture direction for 66 events. In about 30 per cent of the cases, one of the two nodal planes produces a much better fit to the data and can be identified as the true fault plane. When results from previous studies are available for comparison, our rupture directions are usually consistent with their results, particularly for earthquakes with simple rupture histories. © 2005 RAS.