Tomographic Imaging of the Central California Crust with Multiple Methods

Clifford H. Thurber, Avinash Nayak, Hongjian Fang, Xiangfang Zeng, & Haijiang Zhang

Published May 15, 2018, SCEC Contribution #8092

Following the discovery of the Shoreline Fault along the coast of central California by Hardebeck (2010) and the occurrence of the tsunami disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, there has been increased attention on the potential seismic hazards of the central California region in relation to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. The Pacific Gas & Electric Company has supported related research both off shore and onshore, and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) has established a Central California Seismic Project (CCSP) to develop a Community Velocity Model (CVM) and Community Fault Model for the region and use them for strong motion simulations and hazard estimation. The existing SCEC Central California CVM was developed from a USGS velocity model, velocity measurements from wells and seismic surveys, and refinement using waveform tomography. We are working to further refine the Central California CVM by (1) incorporating surface-wave dispersion data from an expanded set of stations and extended to shorter periods (3 to 4 seconds) and (2) incorporating body-wave arrival-time data from earthquakes and P-wave travel times from explosions. The current SCEC Central California CVM will be used as the starting model for new surface-wave inversions, new body-wave inversions, and ultimately joint body wave-surface wave inversions. Inversions using the new data will result in a higher resolution CVM for central California. Research supported by SCEC Award #17188 and USGS Award G16AP00111.

Citation
Thurber, C. H., Nayak, A., Fang, H., Zeng, X., & Zhang, H. (2018, 05). Tomographic Imaging of the Central California Crust with Multiple Methods. Oral Presentation at 2018 Seismology of the Americas Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
CCSP