High Resolution Telesesimic P-wave Back-Projection Imaging Using Variable Travel Time Corrections: Characterizing Sub-Events of the Great April 11th 2012 Indian Ocean Intraplate Earthquakes

Two of the largest strike-slip earthquakes ever recorded occurred off the coast of northern Sumatra on April 11th 2012. The Mw 8.7 mainshock and Mw 8.2 aftershock occurred east of the NinetyEast Ridge in the Wharton Basin, a region of intraplate deformation with prominent fracture zones striking NNE-SSW. The relative lack of geodetic and local seismic data compared to other recent great earthquakes make teleseismic data especially important for understanding the rupture properties of these events. We performed short-period P-wave back-projection imaging using independent networks of stations in Europe and Japan. Preliminary images from the two networks showed similarly complex multi-event sources for the mainshock that indicate rupture occurred along both nodal planes of the gCMT solution, consistent with the locations of early aftershocks. Back-projection images of the Mw 8.2 aftershock showed a single, compact, bilateral rupture corresponding to the NNE-SSW nodal plane of the CMT solution [Yue et al., 2012]. Here we improve upon the resolution and accuracy of our initial back-projection images by estimating station specific travel time corrections that vary across the source region [e.g., Ishii et al., 2007]. These corrections are used to compensate for 3D variations in Earth structure that occur between the source region and the seismometers, and act to focus the array beams. We perform multi-channel cross-correlations of P waves recorded for 7 aftershocks that were (1) distributed broadly around the source region and (2) well-observed at seismometers in Europe. For each seismometer in the array, the 8 measured static corrections are smoothly interpolated over the entire source region with a Kriging method to form a travel time correction surface. These surfaces are then used with an otherwise conventional back-projection approach [Xu et al., 2009] to image the ruptures. Our new images are broadly consistent with our original results, indicating that the extraordinary complexity of the main event is not an artifact of 3D variations in Earth structure. Both preliminary and new back-projection images show mainshock subevents that rupture in directions corresponding to both gCMT nodal planes, with only subtle changes in the location and beam power strength of the sub-events. The results are compared with back-projections of synthetic seismograms for the 4-fault rupture model for the 8.7 event from Yue et al. [2012], to evaluate effects of depth phase and rupture complexity interference. There is more variability in the rupture images of the 8.2 Mw aftershock, with the peak beam energy shifting up to 40-50 km along a NNE-SSW direction. The sensitivity of these results to various Kriging approaches is being investigated.