Three-dimensional coseismic displacements and slip distribution of the 2021 Mw 7.4 maduo earthquake: Synergy of SAR, InSAR and optical images

Abstract

On 21 May 2021, an earthquake of moment magnitude (Mw) 7.4 occurred near Maduo county in Qinghai Province China. This is the first major earthquake that occurred in the interior of the Bayan Har block in the Tibetan Plateau over the past 70 decades. Focusing on this event, we conducted a study on three-dimensional (3D) coseismic displacement reconstruction and its tectonic implication. We acquired both Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical imaging satellite imagery, including SAR images from Sentinel-1 and Advanced Land Observation Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) as well as the multi-spectrum images from the Sentinel-2 (S2) satellite. We applied the Interferometric SAR (InSAR) and pixel-offset tracking (POT) techniques to coseismic SAR data pairs and reconstructed two dimensional displacements. With the constructed displacement fields in multiple viewing directions, we resolved the 3D coseismic displacements (north-south, east-west, and up components) by integrating the regional strain model with variance components estimation (SM-VCE). We recommend using the standard deviation value at each grid cell, which can be calculated in the resampling, as the initial weight. Based on the resolved 3D coseismic displacements, we further estimated the dip angles for the two segments (F4 and F5) in the east of the rupture zone. The associated moment magnitude is about Mw7.4, which corresponds to the released energy of ∼ 1.74×1020 Nm.