Abstract
An earthquake ofM S=6.9 occurred at the Gonghe, Qinghai Province, China on April 26, 1990. Three larger aftershocks took place at the same region,M S=5.5 on May 7, 1990,M S=6.0 on Jan. 3, 1994 andM S=5.7 on Feb. 16, 1994. The long-period recordings of the main shock from China Digital Seismograph Network (CD-SN) are deconvolved for the source time functions by the correspondent recordings of the three aftershocks as empirical Green’s functions (EGFs). No matter which aftershock is taken as EGF, the relative source time functions (RSTFs) obtained are nearly identical. The RSTFs suggest theM S=6.9 event consists of at least two subevents with approximately equal size whose occurrence times are about 30 s apart, the first one has a duration of 12 s and a rise time of about 5 s, and the second one has a duration of 17 s and a rise time of about 8 s. Comparing the RSTFs obtained from P- and SH-phases respectively, we notice that those from SH-phases are a slightly more complex than those from P-phases, implying other finer subevents exist during the process of the main shock. It is interesting that the results from the EGF deconvolution of long-period wavform data are in good agreement with the results from the moment tensor inversion and from the EGF deconvolution of broadband waveform data. Additionally, the two larger aftershocks are deconvolved for their RSTFs. The deconvolution results show that the processes of theM S=6.0 event on Jan. 3, 1994 and theM S=5.7 event on Feb. 16, 1994 are quite simple, both RSTFs are single impulses.
The RSTFs of theM S=6.9 main shock obtained from different stations are noticed to be azimuthally dependent, whose shapes are a slightly different with different stations. However, the RSTFs of the two smaller aftershocks are not azimuthally dependent. The integrations of RSTFs over the processes are quite close to each other, i. e., the scalar seismic moments estimated from different stations are in good agreement.
Finally the scalar seismic moments of the three aftershocks are compared. The relative scalar seismic moment of the three aftershocks deduced from the relative scalar seismic moments of theM S=6.9 main shock are very close to those inverted directly from the EGF deconvolution. The relative scalar seismic moment of theM S=6.9 main shock calculated using the three aftershocks as EGF are 22 (theM S=6.0 aftershock being EGF), 26 (theM S=5.7 aftershock being EGF) and 66 (theM S=5.5 aftershock being EGF), respectively. Deducing from those results, the relative scalar sesimic moments of theM S=6.0 to theM S=5.7 events, theM S=6.0 to theM S=5.5 events and theM S=5.7 to theM S=5.5 events are 1.18, 3.00 and 2.54, respectively. The correspondent relative scalar seismic moments calculated directly from the waveform recordings are 1.15, 3.43, and 3.05.
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Contribution No. 96B0007, Institute of Geophysics, SSB, China.
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Xu, lS., Chen, YT. Source time functions of the Gonghe, China earthquake retrieved from long-period digital waveform data using empirical Green’s function technique. Acta Seismologica Sinica 9, 209–222 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02651065
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02651065