Co-seismic horizontal offsets and fault trace mapping using phase correlation of IRS satellite images: the 1999 Izmit (Turkey) earthquake

Abstract

On August 17, 1999, a strong earthquake (Mw ≈ 7.4) occurred along the western sector of the North Anatolian Fault system in Turkey. The epicenter was located near the city of Izmit, 50 km east of Istanbul. Previous works determined the coseismic surface displacements by satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) and satellite optical-image correlation. In 1999, the highest spatial resolution orbiting camera was the panchromatic sensor (PAN), a 5.8-m pixel sensor (SPOT 2 was a 10-m pixel sensor) onboard the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellite. We propose to apply a new phase-correlation method to PAN images to study the coseismic rupture due to the Izmit earthquake. The phase-correlation method does not need phase unwrapping and was proved to be robust under a wide variety of circumstances. Image correlometry deals with the quantification of the subpixel offsets over the whole image, allowing displacement measurement with an accuracy that is proportional to the pixel size. We measured the near-field deformations exploiting two geometrically corrected IRS images with similar look angles. A quality check of the derived offset map was performed by comparison with GPS benchmarks and SPOT offsets. The results show that IRS PAN images can be correlated to derive coseismic slip offsets due to a large earthquake (and to map its fault trace).