Joint inversion of strong motion, teleseismic, geodetic, and tsunami datasets for the rupture process of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake

Abstract

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was observed by dense strong motion, teleseismic, geodetic, and tsunami networks. We first inverted each of the datasets obtained by the networks separately, for the rupture process of the earthquake. We then performed checkerboard resolution tests for assessing the resolving power of these datasets. In order to overcome the limited resolutions of the separate inversions and differences in their results, we performed a quadruple joint inversion of all these data to determine a source model most suitable for explaining all the datasets. In the obtained source model, the maximum coseismic slip was approximately 35m, and the total seismic moment was calculated to be 4.2 × 10 22 Nm, which yielded M w =9.0. The main rupture propagated not only in the strike direction but also in the dip direction and included both the deep area called the Miyagi-oki region and the compact shallow area near the Japan Trench. Copyright © 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.