SCEC Award Number 14059 View PDF
Proposal Category Workshop Proposal
Proposal Title Source Inversion Validation (SIV) Workshop
Investigator(s)
Name Organization
Paul Mai King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Saudi Arabia) Danijel Schorlemmer University of Southern California Morgan Page United States Geological Survey
Other Participants
SCEC Priorities 6b, 6e, 4b SCEC Groups CSEP, FARM, GMP
Report Due Date 10/07/2014 Date Report Submitted N/A
Project Abstract
 Finite-fault earthquake source inversions have grown into a standard analysis tool for studying the kinematics of earthquake ruptures by inverting seismic and/or geodetic data. However, we still know little about the resulting uncertainties of the inferred kinematic rupture models. Which features are well resolved and reliably imaged in these rupture models? Which features are inversion artifacts? What can we trust of a rupture model, and how can we quantify its uncertainties? It is worth mentioning in this context that despite these important shortcomings, several researchers/institutions develop “near real-time rapid source inversions” that are published online a few hours after the earthquake. That is, though finite-fault inversions may in principle provide information about the space-time evolution of the earthquake rupture process, the resolution and robustness of these inversion results are highly questionable. The Source Inversion Validation (SIV) Task Group gathered for the 2014 SIV workshop, in conjunction with the 2014 SCEC Annual Meeting, to discuss the latest developments and progress, and to plan future activities.
Intellectual Merit SCEC has formed the source-inversion validation (SIV) Technical Activity Group (TAG) to assess the accuracy and resolving power of source inversions. This effort recognizes that, despite years of active research and a growing body of published finite-fault rupture models, our understanding of the uncertainties in source inversions, and hence the reliability of inverted source models, is still limited. The SIV project tackles this issue through a series of benchmark exercises. In addition, the SIV efforts are important for more accurate prediction of strong ground motion (as rupture-model generators are conditioned to reproduce features of published finite-fault rupture models), and to better understand earthquake dynamics (based on the detail space-time evolution of slip-rate over the fault plane) and overall earthquake mechanics (e.g. source-scaling from small to large earthquakes).
Broader Impacts The SIV project builds synergies with the rupture dynamics community, and is particularly important for SCEC’s ground-motion simulation validation (GMSV) efforts. We thus engage with the earthquake engineering community as well as the fault and rupture mechanics (FARM) scientists. We also have ties to the geodetic source-inversion validation (GSIV) efforts as they are interested to adopt (parts of) the SIV quantitative comparison tools. Hence, the SIV efforts serve a broader community than only the source-inversion group.
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