Exciting news! We're transitioning to the Statewide California Earthquake Center. Our new website is under construction, but we'll continue using this website for SCEC business in the meantime. We're also archiving the Southern Center site to preserve its rich history. A new and improved platform is coming soon!

Beyond Basin Resonance: Characterizing Wave Propagation Using a Dense Array and the Ambient Seismic Field

Pierre Boué, Marine A. Denolle, Naoshi Hirata, Shigeki Nakagawa, & Greg C. Beroza

Published February 1, 2016, SCEC Contribution #6180

Seismic wave resonance in basins is a well-recognized seismic hazard; however, for some earthquakes damage concentrates near basin edges, where wave propagation is particularly complex and difficult to understand with sparse observations. The Tokyo metropolitan area is densely populated, subject to strong shaking from a diversity of earthquake sources, and sits atop the deep Kanto sedimentary basin. It is also instrumented with two seismic arrays: the dense MEtropolitan Seismic Observation network (MeSO-net) within the basin, and the High sensitivity seismograph network (Hi-net) surrounding it. In this study, we explore the 3D seismic wave-field within and throughout the Kanto Basin, including near and across basin boundaries, using cross-correlations of all components of ambient seismic field between the stations of these two arrays. Dense observations allow us to observe clearly the propagation of three modes of both Rayleigh and Love waves. They also show how the wave field behaves in the vicinity of sharp basin edges with reflected/converted waves and excitation of higher-modes.

Citation
Boué, P., Denolle, M. A., Hirata, N., Nakagawa, S., & Beroza, G. C. (2016). Beyond Basin Resonance: Characterizing Wave Propagation Using a Dense Array and the Ambient Seismic Field. Geophysical Journal International, 206(2), 1261-1272.