Surface Wave Path Corrections and Source Inversions in Southern California

The cut-and-paste (CAP) method for retrieving earthquake source parameters has proven useful in many regions. Since CAP breaks three-component data into Pnl and surface wave segments and models them separately, imperfect 1D Green’s functions can be effectively used to model the records and determine source parameters. The resultant time shifts for different segments, for example, Pnl or surface waves, can provide valuable data for improving the velocity model or Green’s functions. Moreover, if these shifts can be known from empirical path calibrations or estimated from a tomographic map, we can recover both source mechanism and location with an extended procedure CAPloc (Tan et al., 2006). Here we present a complete workflow from path calibration to source inversion in southern California. In particular, we use the CAP results from about 160 events with known locations to derive the Rayleigh and Love wave group velocity maps. We take a tomographic approach to solve for lateral velocity variations in 10 km size cells in a uniformly 12 km thick seismogenic layer. Velocity variations of up to 15% are observed and the patterns correlate well with some geological features. Synthetic surface waves for 2D cuts throughout the model with a finite difference approach show significant improvement over 1D synthetics in fitting surface wave travel times, but little difference in waveforms, which suggests 1D synthetics are sufficient in modeling with simple time shifts. This simplification allows source inversion for both mechanism and location to be easily obtained with CAPloc. Finally, we test the effectiveness of CAPloc in determining source parameters, including both mechanisms and locations with such calibration maps in poorly monitored situations. In particular, we focus on two station inversions with two pioneer stations PAS and GSC, which have appropriate recordings since 1960. Considerable success is achieved when the events are bracketed.