Parallel 3D Simulation of Seismic Wave Propagation in the Structure of Nobi Plain, Central Japan

We performed large-scale parallel simulations of the seismic wave propagation to understand the complex wave behavior in the 3D basin structure of the Nobi Plain, which is one of the high population cities in central Japan. In this area, many large earthquakes occurred in the past, such as the 1891 Nobi earthquake (M8.0), the 1944 Tonankai earthquake (M7.9) and the 1945 Mikawa earthquake (M6.8). In order to mitigate the potential disasters for future earthquakes, 3D subsurface structure of Nobi Plain has recently been investigated by local governments. We referred to this model together with bouguer anomaly data to construct a detail 3D basin structure model for Nobi plain, and conducted computer simulations of ground motions. We first evaluated the ground motions for two small earthquakes (M4~5); one occurred just beneath the basin edge at west, and the other occurred at south. The ground motions from these earthquakes were well recorded by the strong motion networks; K-net, Kik-net, and seismic intensity instruments operated by local governments. We compare the observed seismograms with simulations to validate the 3D model. For the 3D simulation we sliced the 3D model into a number of layers to assign to many processors for concurrent computing. The equation of motions are solved using a high order (32nd) staggered-grid FDM in horizontal directions, and a conventional (4th-order) FDM in vertical direction with the MPI inter-processor communications between neighbor region. The simulation model is 128km by 128km by 43km, which is discritized at variable grid size of 62.5-125m in horizontal directions and of 31.25-62.5m in vertical direction. We assigned a minimum shear wave velocity is Vs=0.4km/s, at the top of the sedimentary basin. The seismic sources for the small events are approximated by double-couple point source and we simulate the seismic wave propagation at maximum frequency of 2Hz. We used the Earth Simulator (JAMSTEC, Yokohama Inst) to conduct such large simulation. The parallel simulation using 256CPUs of the Earth Simulator took computer memory of 260GByte and wall-clock time of 8.3hours. Comparisons between the observed waveforms and computed simulations for two earthquakes agree well, so that it is indicating the effectiveness of the 3D model. We therefore conducted another simulation to estimate the pattern of strong ground motion during large earthquakes such as for the 1945 Mikawa earthquake. We employ the fault rupture model of Kikuchi et al (2003), which is derived from the inversion of regional records, and the pseudo dynamic source time function of Nakamura and Miyatake (2000). The simulated wavefield from the Mikawa earthquake is dominating in large surface waves at amplitude over 10cm/s and a relatively long period of 6-8s in the center of the Nobi plain. We also find directivity effect of the fault rupture from south to north in the PGV distribution and waveforms. This explains the major pattern of seismic intensity distribution and the strong motion damage during the earthquake.