Discriminating non-seismic long-period pulses and noise to improve earthquake source inversion

Abstract

Broadband seismometers produce artifacts resembling long-period pulses (non-seismic pulses) that degrade centroid moment tensor (CMT) estimations based on waveform inversion of broadband seismic records in long-period bands (50–200 s). We propose a method to discriminate non-seismic pulses and long-period noise from seismic signals, which can be applied to automatic CMT inversion analysis. In this method, we calculate source amplitudes as peak-to-peak displacement amplitudes in individual long-period seismic records after each event has been corrected for medium attenuation and geometric spreading and then estimate the ratios of individual source amplitudes to the minimum source amplitude. Because source amplitude ratios for non-seismic pulses tend to be greater than those of the seismic signals, we use seismic records in CMT estimations only if their source amplitude ratios are lower than a threshold value (R). We tested this method using broadband seismic data from the Philippines and found that reprocessed inversion solutions using this method showed a clear improvement when using R = 11, although focal mechanism estimations were not entirely stable. To investigate the general applicability of this method, we analyzed broadband seismic data from F-net in Japan. Our analysis indicated that source amplitude ratios in F-net data ranged up to about 20, indicating that the threshold value may be dependent on station density. Given that F-net is one of the highest density networks in the world, we may assume that a threshold value between 10 and 20 is appropriate for application of our method for most regional broadband networks. Our synthetic tests indicated that source amplitude ratios can be as high as 103, although observed ratios are only within the range 10–20. This suggests that we happened to observe only events having focal mechanisms with source amplitude ratios of 10–20. Alternatively, these high source amplitude ratios can be explained by distortion of radiation patterns in the long-period band, which reduces maximum source amplitude ratios and affects CMT estimates.