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Published August 2014 | Published
Journal Article Open

Dynamic earthquake rupture modelled with an unstructured 3-D spectral element method applied to the 2011 M9 Tohoku earthquake

Abstract

An important goal of computational seismology is to simulate dynamic earthquake rupture and strong ground motion in realistic models that include crustal heterogeneities and complex fault geometries. To accomplish this, we incorporate dynamic rupture modelling capabilities in a spectral element solver on unstructured meshes, the 3-D open source code SPECFEM3D, and employ state-of-the-art software for the generation of unstructured meshes of hexahedral elements. These tools provide high flexibility in representing fault systems with complex geometries, including faults with branches and non-planar faults. The domain size is extended with progressive mesh coarsening to maintain an accurate resolution of the static field. Our implementation of dynamic rupture does not affect the parallel scalability of the code. We verify our implementation by comparing our results to those of two finite element codes on benchmark problems including branched faults. Finally, we present a preliminary dynamic rupture model of the 2011 M_w 9.0 Tohoku earthquake including a non-planar plate interface with heterogeneous frictional properties and initial stresses. Our simulation reproduces qualitatively the depth-dependent frequency content of the source and the large slip close to the trench observed for this earthquake.

Additional Information

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 May 28. Received 2014 May 26; in original form 2013 December 5. This study was supported by the QUEST project (Quantitative Estimation of Earth's Seismic Sources and Structure) funded by the 7th Framework Programm of the European Commission, the ASCETE Project (Advanced Simulation of Coupled Earthquake and Tsunami Events) funded by the Volkswagen Foundation within the program 'New Conceptual Approaches to Modeling and Simulation of Complex Systems', by the US National Science Foundation (CAREER award EAR-1151926) and by the Southern California Earthquake Center (based on NSF Cooperative Agreement EAR-0529922 and USGS Cooperative Agreement 07HQAC0026). Simulations were done at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), under the production projects 'Development of Dynamic Rupture Models to Study the Physics of Earthquakes and Near-Source Ground Motion' and 'Development of a Database of Physics-Based Synthetic Earthquakes for Ground Motion Prediction'. We thank Yihe Huang for discussions on observations and modelling of the Tohoku earthquake and for sharing her results of a 2-D convergence test.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 17, 2023