Determination of earthquake magnitudes using duration of high-frequency energy radiation and maximum displacement amplitudes: application to the January 13, 2007 East of the Kuril Islands earthquake

Tatsuhiko Hara

International Institute of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering, Building Research Institute

Recently, we developed a new method to determine earthquake magnitudes using the following formula (Hara, 2007):

where M is an earthquake magnitude, is the maximum displacement during high-frequency energy radiation from the arrival time of a P-wave, is the epicentral distance, is duration of high-frequency energy radiation. The duration of high-frequency energy radiation can be estimated by band-pass filtering of first arriving P-waves (Lomax, 2005; Park et al., 2005; Ni et al., 2005; Hara, 2007). are 0.79, 0.83, 0.69, and 6.47, respectively (the units of were m, km, and s, respectively).

We applied this method to the January 13, 2007 East of the Kuril Islands earthquake (the origin time: 04:23:20UTC; the location 46.288°N, 154.448°E after USGS). Figure 1 shows an example of measurements of high-frequency energy radiation. The estimated duration is 83.1 sec. The estimated magnitude using the above formula is 8.2, which agrees with Mw of the Global CMT solution (8.1).

Fig. 1. An example of measurements of high frequency energy radiation. The upper and lower traces are an observed seismogram and its smoothed time series of squares of band-pass (2-4 Hz) filtered seismogram (normalized by the maximum value), respectively. “A” and “F” in the lower trace denote the arrival of P-wave and estimated end of high frequency energy radiation, respectively.

References

Hara, T., Measurement of duration of high-frequency energy radiation and its application to determination of magnitudes of large shallow earthquakes, accepted for publication in Earth Planets Space, 2007.

Lomax, A., Rapid estimation of rupture extent for large earthquakes: Application to the 2004, M9 Sumatra-Andaman mega-thrust, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L10314, doi:10.1029/2005GL022437, 2005.

Ni, S., H. Kanamori, and D. Helmberger, Energy radiation from the Sumatra earthquake, Nature, 434, 582, 2005.

Park, J., K. Anderson, R. Aster, R. Butler, T. Lay, and D. Simpson, Global seismographic network records the great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, Eos Trans. AGU, 86(6), 57, 2005.

Last Updated: 2007/01/14