Variations of the specific barrier model—part II: effect of isochron distributions

Abstract

The specific barrier model (SBM) is a particular case of a composite earthquake source model where the seismic moment is distributed in a deterministic manner on a rectangular fault plane on the basis of moment and area constraints. It is assumed that the fault surface is composed of an aggregate of subevents of equal diameter, the ‘barrier interval’. Furthermore, the subevents are assumed to rupture randomly and statistically independent of one another as the rupture front sweeps the fault plane. In the formulation of the far-field source spectrum of the SBM the ‘arrival time’ of the seismic radiation emitted by each subevent is specified via a probability density function (PDF). In the SBM the subevents are assumed to be of equal sizes (an assumption relaxed in a companion paper, referred to as Part I) and the PDF of ‘arrival times’ is assumed to be uniform. In this study we investigate the effects of different PDFs of ‘arrival times’ on the far-field source spectrum of the SBM. Different PDFs of ‘arrival times’ affect the source spectra primarily at the intermediate frequency range (between the first and second corner frequencies). Such effects become more pronounced as the earthquake magnitude increases. The far-field spectrum of seismic energy observed/recorded at a site depends on the location of the site relative to the causative fault plane, the location of rupture initiation (hypocenter) and the onset times of the rupturing subevents. All the above factors are effectively taken into account by the ‘isochrons’, which vary with source-site geometry. We investigate the selection of the appropriate PDF of seismic energy arrival times at a given site by computing isochrons for a grid of stations surrounding the earthquake fault, represented by the SBM. We show that only for stations located in a direction normal to the fault plane is the assumption of uniform PDF of ‘arrival times’ valid. At other sites non-uniform PDFs of ‘arrival times’ are observed. We identify and categorize the prevalent types of PDFs by directivity (forward vs. backward vs. neutral) and source-site distance (near-fault vs. far-field), show examples in which we group the stations accordingly. We investigate the effects of the different PDF-groups on the SBM source spectrum. Selection of the appropriate PDF for a given source-site configuration when simulating strong ground motions using the SBM in the context of the stochastic method is expected to yield more self-consistent, and physically realistic simulations.