SCEC Award Number 10021 View PDF
Proposal Category Collaborative Proposal (Data Gathering and Products)
Proposal Title Integrating Tomographically Improved Earth Structure Models Into Ground- Motion Simulations for Physics-based Seismic Hazard Analysis: Integration of SCEC CME Computational Pathway 2 and 4
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Po Chen University of Wyoming Kim Olsen San Diego State University John Shaw Harvard University
Other Participants Two graduate students will be involved, Mr. Lee, En-Jui at University of Wyoming and another graduate student at SDSU.
SCEC Priorities B4, C, B2 SCEC Groups USR, GMP, Seismology
Report Due Date 02/28/2011 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
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Intellectual Merit Recently, SCEC geophysicists and computer scientists have developed computational platforms for improving USR by full-3D tomographic inversions (F3DT) of observed ground motions from local small earthquakes (Pathway 4). In F3DT, the starting model as well as the derived model perturbation is 3D in space and the Fréchet kernels are computed using the full-physics of 3D wave propagation. Two physically equivalent but computationally distinct approaches to the inverse problem have been developed, the scattering-integral method, which sets up the inverse problem by calculating and storing the Fréchet kernels for each data functional (Zhao et al. 2005), and the adjoint-wavefield method, which back-propagates the data from the receivers to image structure (Tromp et al. 2005). Both approaches require many Pathway 2 simulations. The purpose of this project is to develop computational infrastructures to integrate Pathway 2 and 4 by delivering to the SCEC USR databases the tomographically derived structural perturbations as overlays on the starting models and incorporating those updated structure models into Pathway 2 simulations and quantifying the improvements and deficits of those updated models.
Broader Impacts A. Develop a standardized procedure for delivering tomographically derived structural perturbations to the SCEC simulation community as structural overlays onto the reference models.
B. Assess the quality of the updated structural models through a standardized set of measurements that quantify the misfit between observed seismograms and model- predicted seismograms.
C. Improve the parameterization of 3D structure in terms of seismic velocities, attenuation factors and anisotropy.
Exemplary Figure N/A