Attenuation of Lg waves in the New Madrid seismic zone of the central United States using the coda normalization method

Abstract

Unique properties of coda waves are employed to evaluate the frequency dependent quality factor of Lg waves using the coda normalization method in the New Madrid seismic zone of the central United States. Instrument and site responses are eliminated and source functions are isolated to construct the inversion problem. For this purpose, we used 121 seismograms from 37 events with moment magnitudes, M, ranging from 2.5 to 5.2 and hypocentral distances from 120 to 440 km recorded by 11 broadband stations. A singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm is used to extract Q values from the data, while the geometric spreading exponent is assumed to be a constant. Inversion results are then fitted with a power law equation from 3 to 12 Hz to derive the frequency dependent quality factor function. The final results of the analysis are QVLg (f) = (410 ± 38) f0.49 ± 0.05 for the vertical component and QHLg (f) = (390 ± 26) f0.56 ± 0.04 for the horizontal component, where the term after ± sign represents one standard error. For stations within the Mississippi embayment with an average sediment depth of 1 km around the Memphis metropolitan area, estimation of quality factor using the coda normalization method is not well-constrained at low frequencies (f < 3 Hz). There may be several reasons contributing to this issue, such as low frequency surface wave contamination, site effects, or even a change in coda wave scattering regime which can exacerbate the scatter of the data.

Publication Title

Tectonophysics

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