Shear-Wave Radiation Patterns from Explosive and Earthquake Sources in Scattering, Heterogeneous Media

Peter Nelson; Neala Creasy

doi:10.26443/seismica.v4i2.1123

Authors

Peter Nelson Los Alamos National Laboratory
Neala Creasy Los Alamos National Laboratory https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2557-6247

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26443/seismica.v4i2.1123

Keywords:

explosion monitoring

Abstract

Distinguishing whether a seismic event is an earthquake or an explosion is a core problem in explosion monitoring. For simplistic models, earthquakes produce a predictable S-wavefield based on their radiation pattern, while an explosion produces no S-wavefield. However, observations from nuclear tests show that explosions can produce significant S-wave energy on both horizontal components. We perform numerical experiments using SPECFEM to constrain when an S-wavefield generated from an explosion might differ from one produced by an earthquake. We generate the S-wavefield for our explosions by placing the source location within a small region consisting of large velocity heterogeneities. For the 2D cases investigated here, a crucial condition is that the size of the region of heterogeneities must be much smaller (approximately 1/12th) than the minimum wavelength of the wavefield for our simulation setups. We investigate both isotropic heterogeneities and anisotropic heterogeneities. Initial results demonstrate that the heterogeneous region lowers the P/S amplitude ratios of an explosion. The presence of strong anisotropic heterogeneities near the source can also produce an S-wavefield with similar amplitudes to the P-wavefield. Lastly, we show that S-wave polarization angles vary as a function of azimuth and distance for explosive sources in the presence of small-scale heterogeneities.

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Shear-Wave Radiation Patterns from Explosive and Earthquake Sources in Scattering, Heterogeneous Media

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