SCEC Award Number 12230 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title Source Inversion Validation (SIV) Workshop
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Paul Martin Mai King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia) Danijel Schorlemmer University of Southern California Morgan Page United States Geological Survey
Other Participants approximately 50-60 workshop participants
SCEC Priorities 2e, 6b, 6e SCEC Groups SIV, FARM, GMP
Report Due Date 10/09/2012 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 The Source Inversion Validation (SIV) group conducted its 2012 workshop in conjunction with the Annual SCEC meeting in Palm Springs (Sept 9-12, 2012). This was the 7th SIV-workshop since 2008, gathering scientists working on earthquake source inversion to discuss methods and approaches to source inversion, to share the latest results related to the SIV exercises, and to discuss the continuation of the SIV project.
There were approximately 50 participants in attendance during the 4-hr workshop. The detailed program of the workshop is given in Figure 1. The “Notes” below summarize the presentation and subsequent discussion of the workshop. The main outcome of the 2012 SIV workshop was a detailed plan for how to attract external funding (for both US and non-US scientists) to support and motivate SIV-participating researchers (and their teams). It was also decided to try to rapidly write a joint collaborative paper on the SIV project to create visibility and attract further research groups to participate, but also to raise awareness in the seismology and earthquake-engineering communities regarding uncertainty quantification in earthquake source inversion.
The SIV-project is making continuous progress. We hope that our above activities (seeking funding; publishing a paper) will help to accelerate the pace of the SIV-efforts.
Intellectual Merit The SIV exercise addresses the following key questions that are relevant for the SCEC science objectives but also for earthquake seismology and earthquake engineering in general:
1) prediction of strong ground motions
2) static offset on a fault,
3) earthquake rupture history (e.g., if the rupture is supershear)
4) source physics (e.g., the source-velocity function at a point).
Broader Impacts Earthquake source inversion is the key approach to image the properties of earthquake ruptures. However, various method for source inversion, applied to the same data set, often return inconsistent results. Also, uncertainties in earthquake source inversion are poorly known. The SIV project, and the related workshop, addresses this fundamental problem in earthquake seismology.
SIV-research attempts to quantify the intra-event variability of rupture models, and to investigate to what extent earthquake source imaging can illuminate
the physics of earthquake rupture.

Within our SIV-efforts, we develop on online collaborative platform to disseminate benchmark exercises, and to collect and quantitatively analyze the results. Several PhD students and post-docs at various international institutions are participating in the SIV efforts, and hence became part of a growing internationally operating team.
Exemplary Figure Figure 1