Broadband time domain modeling of earthquakes from Friuli, Italy

Abstract

Short-period (SP) and long-period (LP) seismograms written by the main shock and two principal aftershocks of the 1976 Friuli, Italy, earthquake sequence are modeled in the time domain using synthetic seismograms. The main shock occurred on 6 May 1976 (20h 00m, M_s = 6.5) and both aftershocks on 15 September 1976 (03h 15m, M_s = 6.0 and 09h 21m, M_s = 5.9). Source models were determined initially by trial and error and then refined using a waveform inversion program. Two point sources of radiation are required to adequately model the aftershock short-period records. For the 09h 21m aftershock, the model derived from short-period records also produces good fits to the long-period data. The seismic moment of this earthquake is found to be 0.8 to 1.0 × 10²⁵ dyne-cm. The SP model for the 03h 15m aftershock, on the other hand, predicts long-period synthetics which do not agree with the observations. In particular, the SP moment (0.37 × 10²⁵ dyne-cm) is about $212$ times smaller than the LP moment (1 × 10²⁵ dyne-cm). Adding a long-period component to the SP model considerably improves LP waveform and moment agreement. In the case of the main shock, a reasonable fit to the observed SP data is obtained using three point sources of radiation. However, LP synthetics computed using this model do not agree with the observations, and the SP moment (0.65 × 10²⁵ dyne-cm) is a small fraction of the LP moment (3 to 5 × 10²⁵ dyne-cm). Time function durations indicate that the individual events inferred from the SP records are radiated from patches of the fault having radii of 2 to 4 km and stress drops in the range 35 to 276 bars. In comparison, stress drops estimated from LP data are found to be 12 bars (main shock) and 24 bars (09h 21m aftershock). These observations suggest that the short-period instruments are sensitive to the high-frequency radiation emitted from small, high-stress drop areas on the fault plane whereas the long-period instruments record the overall motion during the earthquake.