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Bayesian framework for inversion of second-order stress glut moments: application to the 2019 Ridgecrest sequence mainshock
  • James Atterholt,
  • Zachary E. Ross
James Atterholt
California Institute of Technology

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Zachary E. Ross
California Institute of Technology
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Abstract

We present a fully Bayesian inverse scheme to determine second moments of the stress glut using teleseismic earthquake seismograms. The second moments form a low-dimensional, physically-motivated representation of the rupture process that captures its spatial extent, source duration, and directivity effects. We determine an ensemble of second moment solutions by employing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and automatic differentiation to efficiently approximate the posterior. This method explicitly constrains the parameter space to be symmetric positive definite, ensuring the derived source properties have physically meaningful values. The framework accounts for the autocorrelation structure of the errors and incorporates hyperpriors on the uncertainty. We validate this methodology using a synthetic test and subsequently apply it to the 2019 Mw7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake using teleseismic data. The distributions of second moments determined for this event provide probabilistic descriptions of low-dimensional rupture characteristics that are generally consistent with results from previous studies. The success of this case study suggests that probabilistic and comparable finite source properties may be discerned for large global events regardless of the quality and coverage of local instrumentation.
Apr 2022Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth volume 127 issue 4. 10.1029/2021JB023780