Comparison of ground truth location of earthquake from InSAR and from ambient seismic noise: A case study of the 1998 Zhangbei earthquake

Abstract

Because ambient seismic noise provides estimated Green’s function (EGF) between two sites with high accuracy, Rayleigh wave propagation along the path connecting the two sites is well resolved. Therefore, earthquakes which are close to one seismic station can be well located with calibration extracting from EGF. We test two algorithms in locating the 1998 Zhangbei earthquake, one algorithm is waveform-based, and the other is traveltime-based. We first compute EGF between station ZHB (a station about 40 km away from the epicenter) and five IC/IRIS stations. With the waveform-based approach, we calculate 1D synthetic single-force Green’s functions between ZHB and other four stations, and obtain traveltime corrections by correlating synthetic Green’s functions with EGFs in period band of 10–30 s. Then we locate the earthquake by minimizing the differential travel times between observed earthquake waveform and the 1D synthetic earthquake waveforms computed with focal mechanism provided by Global CMT after traveltime correction from EGFs. This waveform-based approach yields a location which error is about 13 km away from the location observed with InSAR. With the traveltime-based approach, we begin with measuring group velocity from EGFs as well as group arrival time on observed earthquake waveforms, and then locate the earthquake by minimizing the difference between observed group arrival time and arrival time measured on EGFs. This traveltime-based approach yields accuracy of 3 km, Therefore it is feasible to achieve GT5 (ground truth location with accuracy 5 km) with ambient seismic noises. The less accuracy of the waveform-based approach was mainly caused by uncertainty of focal mechanism.