Collaborative Research: Incorporating SPECFEM3D numerical seismograms in the Global CMT Project

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This research will lay the groundwork for improvements in the scientific description of earthquakes, benefitting researchers in earthquake statistics, seismic tomography, seismic hazard, and seismic discrimination, as well as tectonic interpretation and analysis. This is the first step towards making the results of complex and expensive numerical calculations available for multiple applications and a wide range of users. This work focuses on demonstrating the feasibility of the methodology, but the database and method will be valuable for any research requiring accurate predictions of the global seismic wavefield from an arbitrary earthquake at any location without expensive computation. Two graduate students will be trained in research at the nexus of earthquake science, theoretical seismology, and computational Earth science.This two-year, focused effort will (1) develop a new method for calculating, storing, and accessing high-fidelity long-period synthetic seismograms for state-of-the-art 3D tomographic models of the Earth, and (2) incorporate these seismograms in the earthquake analysis of the Global Centroid-Moment-Tensor (CMT) Project. Currently, the CMT synthetic seismograms are calculated using modern 3D Earth models, but accuracy is limited by the validity of the path-average approximation for mode summation and surface-wave ray theory, inexact predictions of the amplitude and polarization of ground motion, and other unmodeled effects, bias retrieved earthquake parameters. The incorporation of higher-fidelity synthetic seismograms in the CMT analysis will improve the characterization of seismic sources and remove concerns about a key source of uncertainty and bias. The team will adapt the spectral-element wave-equation solver SPECFEM3D_GLOBE to generate a database of kernel seismograms on a global grid of hypocenters, for a large set of station locations, using source-receiver reciprocity to speed up the calculation. Kernel seismograms on the grid will be organized and stored in a format that facilitates rapid access to a particular source region and the stations of the Global Seismographic Network. Kernel seismograms for an arbitrary centroid location will be efficiently calculated by spatial interpolation, in a manner that matches the accuracy of the full forward calculation. The CMT code will be modified to ingest the interpolated SPECFEM3D_GLOBE seismograms and testing will allow the assessment of success of the approach and method. The Princeton numerical seismology group and Lamont earthquake-analysis group will jointly evaluate the approach and fidelity of the waveform interpolation, develop practical formats for accessing the (massive) database of global waveforms, and assess the success of these developments.This project is jointly supported by the Geophysics and Instrumentation and Facilities programs in the Division of Earth Sciences. It is also co-funded by a collaboration between the Directorate for Geosciences and Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to support AI/ML and open science activities in the geosciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.