An Imaging Technique for Subsurface Faults Using Teleseismic-Wave Records

Abstract

It is important for disaster prevention and public safety design to know whether subsurface faults exist, not only in Kobe, which was heavily damaged by the 1995 Hyogo-ken Nanbu earthquake, but also in any urban area which is tectonically active. However, there is still little information on subsurface faults. In this paper, we propose a new approach for sensing subsurface faults using teleseismic-wave array records. Our new method employs an imaging technique similar to the reflection method, but is much less expensive and can be used in urban areas. The target of our method is not the velocity structure itself, but rather the position and size or a subsurface fault. The imaging algorithm is based on the steepest descent method, which is also used in waveform inversion of reflection data. However, since iteration is not required by our approach, only one forward computation together with reverse-time computation of the wavefleld is required. The method proposed in this paper consists of the following steps: 1) pre-processing observed records, 2) forward calculation, 3) calculation of the steepest descent direction of the model parameters, and 4) image analysis and identification of faults. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated using SH synthetic data.