A new earthquake location method based on the waveform inversion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel earthquake location method utilizing waveform inversion, significantly expanding the convergence domain and improving accuracy even from poor initial estimates.

Contribution

It presents a new approach that enlarges the convergence domain of waveform-based earthquake location methods through a simple sub-optimization, enabling more reliable earthquake localization.

Findings

Expands convergence domain by several tens of times.

Achieves accurate earthquake location from poor initial guesses.

Demonstrates effectiveness through extensive numerical experiments.

Abstract

In this paper, a new earthquake location method based on the waveform inversion is proposed. As is known to all, the waveform misfit function is very sensitive to the phase shift between the synthetic waveform signal and the real waveform signal. Thus, the convergence domain of the conventional waveform based earthquake location methods is very small. In present study, by introducing and solving a simple sub-optimization problem, we greatly expand the convergence domain of the waveform based earthquake location method. According to a large number of numerical experiments, the new method expands the range of convergence by several tens of times. This allows us to locate the earthquake accurately even from some relatively bad initial values.