A New Spectral Representation of Earthquake Recordings Using an Improved Hilbert-Huang Transform

Abstract

A new spectral representation method of earthquake recordings using an improved Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is proposed in the paper. Firstly, the problem that the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) decomposed by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in HHT is not exactly orthogonal is pointed out and improved through the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization method which is referred as the orthogonal empirical mode decomposition (OEMD). Combined the OEMD and the Hilbert transform (HT) which is referred as the improved Hilbert-Huang transform (IHHT), the orthogonal intrinsic mode functions (OIMFs) and the orthogonal Hilbert spectrum (OHS) and the orthogonal Hilbert marginal spectrum (OHMS) are obtained. Then, the IHHT has been applied for the analysis of the El Centro earthquake recording. The obtained spectral representation result shows that the OHS gives more detailed and accurate information in a time–frequency–energy presentation than the Hilbert spectrum (HS) and the OHMS gives more faithful low-frequency energy presentation than the Fourier spectrum (FS) and the Hilbert marginal spectrum (HMS).