SCEC Award Number 07102 View PDF
Proposal Category Individual Proposal (Integration and Theory)
Proposal Title Numerical Models of Static Stress Evolution in Active Fault Systems
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Elizabeth Hearn University of British Columbia (Canada)
Other Participants Yaron Finzi (PhD student)
Ali Vaghri (PhD student)
SCEC Priorities A11, A3 SCEC Groups Geodesy, CDM
Report Due Date N/A Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
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Intellectual Merit N/A
Broader Impacts The proposed research will provide partial support for Yaron Finzi and Ali Vaghri, two of my PhD students. The requested funds will also cover travel for me and Yaron to attend the SCEC meeting amd to visit our collaborators at USC, and for me and Ali to travel to Colorado for the CIG - SCEC finite-element modeling meeting organized by Brad Hager, Mark Simons, and Carl Gable. These trips will help foster collaboration and will strengthen bonds between our group at UBC and researchers in southern California.
I continue to use SCEC data products as teaching tools in two classes at UBC: Continuum Mechanics (EOSC 352) and Mechanics of Earthquakes and Faulting (EOSC 562). Three homework assignments for the Continuum Mechanics course are based on the SCEC southern California GPS velocity field. These were updated this year, to include a segment demonstrating
the invariance of the dilatation rate (by rotating the coordinates), and to make the programs and files more compatible with the Windows OS. The students interpolate the velocities, calculate the velocity derivative tensor, compute divergence, rotation, and shear strain rate, and plot these quantities. The exercises comprise MATLAB codes and instructions, and are available to other interested parties on request via FTP. Students in my graduate course on earthquakes and faulting (EOSC 562) will do term projects again this spring, and like last time I taught this course, I will have students modeling strong ground motion using the SCEC CME (specifically, TeraShake). David Okaya has noted that this testing was useful for finding bugs in thed ocumentation. The resulting improvements will make TeraShake even more useful for a wide range of teaching and research purposes.
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