Highlights

A kinematic and dynamic investigation of early magnitude estimation

AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco CA, USA, 10-14 December, 2007
S. Murphy and S. Nielsen

Abstract

Recent seismological analysis has shown a general scaling between final magnitude and the averaged first few seconds of ground motion recorded by seismic arrays. One possible explanation for this scaling is that an earthquake's final size is somehow related to it's initiation.  Another possible hypothesis is that the initial recorded ground motion relates to a substantial section of the overall fault size.

By using simple dynamic and kinematic models we investigate both theories. Our dynamic models show that scaling is valid only over a narrow magnitude range for a particular class of  rupture. Simple kinematic models on the other hand provide a more itful result whereby scaling between magnitude and a simplified peak ground displacement is similar to that observed in real data.