Abstract
Geodetic fault slip inversions have been generally performed by
employing a least squares method with a spatial smoothing constraint.
However, this conventional method has various problems: difficulty in
strictly estimating non-negative solutions, assumption that unknowns
follow the Gaussian distributions, unsuitability for expressing
spatially non-uniform slip distributions, and high calculation cost for
optimizing many hyper-parameters. Here, we have developed a
trans-dimensional geodetic slip inversion method using the
reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (rj-MCMC) technique to overcome
the problems. Because sub-fault locations were parameterized by the
Voronoi partition and were optimized in our approach, we can estimate a
slip distribution without the spatial smoothing constraint. Moreover, we
introduced scaling factors for observational errors. We applied the
method to the synthetic data and the actual geodetic observational data
associated with the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake and found that the method
successfully reproduced the target slip distributions including a
spatially non-uniform slip distribution. The method provided posterior
probability distributions with the unknowns, which can express a
non-Gaussian distribution such as large slip with low probability. The
estimated scaling factors properly adjusted the initial observational
errors and provided a reasonable slip distribution. Additionally, we
found that checkerboard resolution tests were useful to consider
sensitivity of the observational data for performing the rj-MCMC method.
It is concluded that the developed method is a powerful technique to
solve the problems of the conventional inversion method and to flexibly
express fault-slip distributions considering the complicated
uncertainties.