Automated procedure for point and kinematic source inversion at regional distances

Abstract

The development of fast, automatic routines for the retrieval of point source parameters of medium to large earthquakes was convincingly established in the last years and decades, providing an increasing number of focal mechanism solutions. Original applications at teleseismic distances have been successively accompanied by specific routines for regional data sets. The majority of these methods are based on the fit of low‐passed time traces. We present here a new technique for the automatic retrieval of point source parameters and highly parameterized kinematic rupture models at regional distances, assuming the recently proposed eikonal model to describe the extended source. In our approach we use a larger set of information to better constrain the source parameters, including the fit of amplitude spectra and displacements at different phases and frequency ranges. The time consumption of the inversion process is significantly improved, thanks to the implementation of Green's functions databases. We adopt a multistep inversion approach, finally providing the focal mechanism, magnitude, and centroid location of the point source. For events with magnitude higher than a threshold of Mw 5.5, source geometry, rupture extension, and average slip may be additionally retrieved. We discuss the methodology and the inversion stability, showing applications to significant earthquakes in two case areas. We focus on Germany and Greece, and their neighboring areas, considering major shallow earthquakes in the last 5 years. The proposed method is currently implemented for automatic data processing at the Seismological Observatory of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Germany.