Near field 3D displacement of El Mayor-Cupapah Earthquake: A hybrid approach. (Invited)
Abstract
The surface rupture produced on April 4th of 2010 by the M 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake is an ideal target to be analyzed by remote sensing techniques. It produced over 100 km of scarps, with vertical and horizontal slip on the order of 2 to 3 m in scarcely vegetated, rugged terrain underlain by mostly igneous rocks. A 3D displacement field (DF) was calculated by matching pre- to post-event airborne LiDAR point clouds through the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, which first segments the point clouds into discrete windows, and for each, iteratively converges on a rigid body transformation comprising a translation and a rotation that best aligns the pre- to post-event point clouds. After testing different window sizes, we used a square window 100m a side. The El Mayor-Cucapah LiDAR data sets present special challenges for the ICP technique. The point clouds differ considerably in point density, by ~1:700. This, and the lower precision of the pre-earthquake data, limit the accuracy of the DF results. Despite these issues, the vertical and East-West (E-W) components of the DF from ICP very clearly delineate the trace of the surface rupture, showing east-side down dextral-normal motion in agreement with field measurements and the focal mechanism reported for this event. A systematic error in the LiDAR instrument used for the pre-event survey caused severe distortion of the North-South (N-S) component of the LiDAR returns. After reprocessing the source pre-event point cloud in various ways to correct for the systematic error, a more plausible pattern for the N-S component was obtained for the DF. To have another perspective for the horizontal DF, a subpixel correlation analysis of optical satellite images (SPOT 2.5 m panchromatic images) before and after the earthquake, was performed using the COSI-Corr software. We combined the N-S component from this analysis with the E-W and vertical components of the ICP results, and present the analysis of the resulting DF. We also compare the results from ICP and COSI-Corr individually for each of the horizontal components. Both methods delineate very clearly the rupture, and agree in direction with small discrepancies in magnitude for the horizontal DF. Results from far field deformation measurements obtained from different remote sensing techniques, such as GPS and InSAR, could be fused with the near-field LiDAR and COSI-Corr results to provide a synoptic view of the strain induced by earthquakes such as the El Mayor-Cucapah event.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.G22A..04H
- Keywords:
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- 1209 GEODESY AND GRAVITY Tectonic deformation;
- 7209 SEISMOLOGY Earthquake dynamics;
- 0530 COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS Data presentation and visualization;
- 0933 EXPLORATION GEOPHYSICS Remote sensing