Explosion Source Models for Seismic Monitoring at High Frequencies: Quantification of the Damage Source and Further Validation of Models

Abstract

This paper reports on the first year's accomplishments of a new project to extend explosion models, accounting for source medium damage, to high frequencies. This project builds on a previous three-year project which developed kinematic source descriptions for such models and investigated the seismic radiation for frequencies below ~0.2 Hz. Direct and indirect effects of shock waves including free surface interactions cause material damage which in general contributes volumetric, compensated linear vector dipole (CLVD), and double-couple (DC) sources of seismic radiation. The past project studied two important features of these models: (i) Rayleigh waves excited by a CLVD source and the impact on performance of mb-Ms discrimination and (ii) volumetric moment caused by damage and its impact on estimates of isotropic moment MI and yield estimation. The goal of the current project is to advance these models with a sound physical basis in order to study S wave generation for high frequencies. The tasking is broken down into three major phases: (1) develop and quantify mathematical descriptions of "effective" source functions for damage, which, up until now, were assumed to be a step function, (2) test and validate models against observed spectral features of P/S ratios for the 0.5-3 Hz band, and (3) test and validate models against scaling observations of P/S ratios for the 1-10 Hz band. This year's work involved empirical studies quantifying the amount of volumetric moment contributed by source medium damage.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA568877

Entities

People

  • Howard J. Patton

Organizations

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accounting
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Data Sets
  • Discrimination
  • Elastic Waves
  • Explosions
  • Frequency
  • Ground Based
  • Materials
  • Measurement
  • Nuclear Explosions
  • Observation
  • Radiation
  • Rayleigh Waves
  • Shock Waves
  • Surface Waves
  • Waves

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Seismology