Investigating the effectiveness of rupture directivity during the August 24, 2016 Mw 6.0 Central Italy earthquake

Abstract

In this study we investigate directivity effects associated to the Mw6.0 Amatrice earthquake taking into account the source rupture heterogeneities. We use the directivity predictor proposed by Spudich et al. (2004) which is derived from the isochrones theory. The directivity is computed using a source to site geometry and a focal mechanism. For its simplicity it can be computed once that a moment tensor solution is available. We use this technique to validate the real time solutions. Moreover, because the directivity predictor depends on the rupture velocity it can be used as a proxy to validate the possible rupture history. For the aforementioned reasons our method revealed fruitful for real time applications and helpful to constrain a few main rupture features for further analysis.