SEISMICITY of the CARPATHIANS in 2015

The article describes seismic observations in the Carpathian region in 2015, which were carried out, as before, by two organizations from two states: in Ukraine – the Seismicity department of the Carpathian region of the Institute of Geophysics of the NAS of Ukraine, in Moldova – the Seismology laboratory of the Institute of Geology and Seismology of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova. 20 stationary digital stations with a processing center in L'viv and six stations with a center in Chisinau operated in Ukraine and Moldova respectively. Different programs, local hodographs and magnitudes were used. The consolidated catalogue of earthquakes was created in L'viv. The total number of earthquakes in 2015 was NΣ=164 in the ranges: KR=4.7–12.2, h=1–160 km. The total seismic energy ΣE=5.381012 J. 23 earthquakes with depths h=50–160 km were located in the Vrancea zone. The maximum earthquake with KR=12.2 was registered on January 24 in the Vrancha mountains with hрР=89 km. In the Precarpathian region, nine events with energy classes KR=4.7–8.9 were registered, the total seismic energy of which is ΣЕ=1.25109 J. Increased seismic activity was observed in Transcarpathia. A series of tangible earthquakes with aftershocks was recorded in the Tyachiv area. Their total number was NΣ=77. The strongest tangible earthquake occurred in the area of Okrugla village on July 19 with KR=11.1. The earthquake source is located in the Earth's crust at a depth of h=7.7 km. The earthquake was felt by the population in the epicentral area with an intensity of I=6. In addition, this earthquake, like 5 others, was felt in the territory of northern Romania. In general, a decrease in the seismicity level in the Carpathians in 2015 was observed compared to that in 2013 and 2014.

Fast and Robust Earthquake Source Spectra and Moment Magnitudes from Envelope Inversion

ABSTRACT With the present study, we introduce a fast and robust method to calculate the source displacement spectra of small earthquakes on a local to regional scale. The work is based on the publicly available Qopen method of full envelope inversion, which is further tuned for the given purpose. Important source parameters—seismic moment, moment magnitude, corner frequency, and high-frequency fall off—are determined from the source spectra by fitting a simple earthquake source model. The method is demonstrated by means of a data set comprising the 2018 West Bohemia earthquake swarm. We report moment magnitudes, corner frequencies, and centroid moment tensors inverted from short-period body waves with the Grond package for all earthquakes with a local magnitude larger than 1.8. Moment magnitudes calculated by envelope inversion show a very good agreement to moment magnitudes resulting from the probabilisitc moment tensor inversion. Furthermore, source displacement spectra from envelope inversion show a good agreement with spectra obtained by multiple taper analysis of the direct onsets of body waves but are not affected by the large scatter of the second. The seismic moments obtained with the envelope inversion scale with corner frequencies according to M0∝fc−4.7. Earthquakes of the present data set result in a smaller stress drop for smaller magnitudes. Self-similarity of earthquake rupture is not observed. In addition, we report frequency-dependent site amplification at the used stations.

Determination of coordinates of the earthquake hypocenter by the method of circles

Objective. The aim of the study is to develop a method for determining the coordinates of the earthquake hypocenter using various combinations of second and fourth order figures as a geo-locus of the hypocenter position points.Method. It is known that the line of intersection of figures of the second and fourth orders, in the case of coincidence of focuses, is a circle. To determine the coordinates of the earthquake source, data from seismographs are used, which are used to construct figures of the second and fourth order, the intersection point of which is the hypocenter. When using data from two seismic sensors, there are two figures, the intersection line of which is a circle. A sphere with a radius equal to the radius of the circle is constructed through the center of this circle. For the other two pairs of seismic sensors, two more spheres are also formed, The intersection point of the three spheres obtained is the sought-for hypocenter of the earthquake.Result. A method has been developed for determining the coordinates of an earthquake source using different shapes of the second and fourth orders for different pairs of seismic sensors.Conclusion. The method allows one to select one of the second or fourth order figures for different pairs of seismic sensors, which makes it possible to reduce the error in determining the source coordinates.

Rapid Earthquake Source Description Using Variometric-Derived GPS Displacements toward Application to the 2019 Mw 7.1 Ridgecrest Earthquake

Using near-field high-rate Global Positioning System (GPS) displacements to invert for earthquake fault slips in real time has the potential to improve the accuracy of earthquake early warning or tsunami early warning. For such applications, real-time retrieval of high-accuracy GPS displacements is essential. Here, we report on rapid modeling of the 2019 Mw 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake with real-time GPS displacements derived from a variometric approach with readily available broadcast ephemeris. This method calculates station variations in real time by differencing continuous phase observations and does not rely on precise orbit and clock information. The phase ambiguity is also removed, and thus the method does not suffer from a relatively long convergence time. To improve the accuracy of variometric displacements, we use a local spatial filter to decrease the influence of residual errors that cannot be removed completely by the time difference. We invert for the centroid moment tensor, static fault slips, and fault rupture process from the derived displacements. Our results show that all inverted models are available within about 65 s after the origin time of the earthquake and are comparable with models inverted by real-time precise point positioning displacements. This study highlights the great value of variometric displacements for the rapid earthquake source description with only broadcast ephemeris.

Parallel Dislocation Model Implementation for Earthquake Source Parameter Estimation on Multi-Threaded GPU

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been in the spotlight in various fields because they can process a massive amount of computation at a relatively low price. This research proposes a performance acceleration framework applied to Monte Carlo method-based earthquake source parameter estimation using multi-threaded compute unified device architecture (CUDA) GPU. The Monte Carlo method takes an exhaustive computational burden because iterative nonlinear optimization is performed more than 1000 times. To alleviate this problem, we parallelize the rectangular dislocation model, i.e., the Okada model, since the model consists of independent point-wise computations and takes up most of the time in the nonlinear optimization. Adjusting the degree of common subexpression elimination, thread block size, and constant caching, we obtained the best CUDA optimization configuration that achieves 134.94×, 14.00×, and 2.99× speedups over sequential CPU, 16-threads CPU, and baseline CUDA GPU implementation from the 1000×1000 mesh size, respectively. Then, we evaluated the performance and correctness of four different line search algorithms for the limited memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno with boundaries (L-BFGS-B) optimization in the real earthquake dataset. The results demonstrated Armijo line search to be the most efficient one among the algorithms. The visualization results with the best-fit parameters finally derived by the proposed framework confirm that our framework also approximates the earthquake source parameters with an excellent agreement with the geodetic data, i.e., at most 0.5 cm root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of residual displacement.