Regional Moment Tensors of the 2009 L'Aquila Earthquake Sequence

Abstract

Broadband waveform inversion of ground velocities in the 0.02 0.10 Hz frequency band is successfully applied to 181 earthquakes with ML ≥ 3 of the April, 2009, L'Aquila, Italy, earthquake sequence. This was made possible by the development of a new regional crustal velocity model constrained by deep crustal profiles, surfacewave dispersion and teleseismic Pwave receiver functions and tested through waveform fit. Although all earthquakes exhibit normal faulting, with the fault plane dipping southwest at about 55º for the majority of events, a subset of events had much shallower dips. The issue of confidence in the derived parameters was investigated by applying the same inversion procedure by two groups who subjectively selected different traces for inversion. The unexpected difficulty in modeling the regional broadband waveforms of the mainshock as a point source was investigated through an extensive finitefault modeling of broadband velocity and accelerometer data, which placed the location of major moment release updip and about 47 seconds after the initial firstarrival hypocentral parameters.