A Split of Direction of Propagation and Attenuation of P Waves in the Po Valley

On July 17, 2011 a ML 4.8 earthquake occurred in the PO valley at a 48 km epicentral distance from a seismic station located at Palazzo Te (Mantova). The station is situated on deep quaternary sediments: the uppermost layers are mainly composed of clay and silty clay with interbedded sands; the Robertson index is 1.4<Ic<3.4, as obtained by CPT until a depth of 35 m. In the same layers the Vs value, evaluated by MASW, does not exceed 300 m/s. The recorded seismogram evidences a clear prograde P wave particle motion, that appears rather difficult to explain if we assume the homogeneity of the P waves (that means attenuation is scalar). Note that the degree of nonlinearity is very low given that the maximum strain can be roughly estimated as 10^-5 on the basis of maximum ground velocity of the P wave train considered and the Vp. On the contrary we show that P wave particle motion can be fully (and easily) described by a Homogeneous Isotropic Linear Viscoelastic model (HILV). HILV, as in the 2009 Borcherdt formulation adopted here, allows two different directions of propagation and attenuation; in other words attenuation becomes a vector that is not necessarily parallel to the propagation vector. The results evidence that the incidence angle and the inhomogeneity angle (it is the angle between propagation and attenuation vectors and it is closely related to Q factor) are in good agreement with the geological conditions of the site. Finally, we observed that these results are very similar to the ones obtained when we analyzed two explosions recorded by a seismic station in Milano, also situated in the Po valley at some 140 km from Mantova (Marcellini & Tento, 2011). Borcherdt, R.D. (2009) 'Viscoelastic Waves in Layered Media', Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 305 pp. Marcellini, A. and A. Tento (2011) ' Explosive Sources Prove the Validity of Homogeneous Isotropic Linear Viscoelastic Models', BSSA, Vol. 101, No. 4, pp. 1576-1583.