Structure Beneath the Northern Los Angeles Basins from Teleseismic Receiver Functions

Abstract

This thesis presents part of the work published in Liu et al. (2018). The Los Angeles area is at high risk of seismic amplification due to its location on top of sedimentary basins. It is very important to obtain accurate information on the crustal structure, in particular, the basin structure of the northern basins, in order to estimate the resulting ground motion and earthquake hazards due to a large San Andreas fault earthquake. In the Liu et al. (2018) study, we image the crustal structure beneath the northern basins using a densely spaced, autonomous 3-component seismometer array in the urban Los Angeles area. Using the collected nodal data, the receiver function technique was applied to image the crustal and basin structure. First, the nodal waveforms are compared to nearby broadband data to confirm that the nodal data is suitable for receiver function calculation. Second, receiver functions are computed from the nodal datasets and compared to those from broadband recordings. Third, the nodal receiver functions are interpreted to help characterize the crustal structure beneath the northern basins.