Program NetMoment; Simultaneous Calculation of Moment, Source Corner Frequency, and Site Specific t* from Network Recordings

Abstract

The purpose of computer program NetMoment (Appendix I) is to utilize fundamental knowledge of earthquake sources, propagation attenuation, and site response in a simultaneous inversion of network data to determine the moment and source corner frequency of earthquakes, and site specific t*. The source parameters are especially difficult to determine for small earthquakes. A fundamental problem in determining the source corner frequencies of small earthquakes is that site response can result in spectral corner frequencies in the range that may be expected from the earthquakes themselves. Several authors have identified this as fmax (Hanks, 1982), a constant corner frequency for small events so that below threshold moment (about 1.0 x 10{sup 21} dyne-cm) the corner frequency remains constant the size of events diminishes. Hutchings and Wu (1990) found that for the southern California region, events with moment less than about 1.5 x 10{sup 21} dyne-cm (about magnitude 3.4) show no source effect in their spectra. Hanks (1982) found the threshold to be about 1.0 x l0{sup 21} dyne-cm for other southern California sites. Baise et al. (2002) found borehole recordings on Yerba Buena Island, in San Francisco Bay, to have corner frequencies limited to about 3-5 Hz for M < 4.0 earthquakes in the region. Some authors have attributed this to a minimum source dimension for earthquakes, which results in a decrease in stress drop for smaller events (Archuleta et al., 1982; Papageorgiou and Aki, 1983). alternative explanation is that the constant corner frequencies result from whole path or near site attenuation and/or amplifications due to soil response. This is supported by a wide body of literature (Anderson and Hough, 1984, Hutchings and Wu, 1990, Blakeslee and Malin, 1991; Aster and Shearer, 1991; Abercrombie, 1995). Abercrombie, for example, estimated source corner frequencies from events recorded in granite at a depth of 2.5 Km in the Cajon Pass scientific drill hole and observed corner frequencies about a factor of 10 higher than observed at the surface.