Effect of fault discretization on geodetic source inversion and usefulness of the trans-dimensional inversion approach

Abstract

SUMMARY Earthquake source inversion, which estimates the heterogeneous slip distribution on fault from geophysical data, is a fundamental technique for estimating earthquake rupture process and obtaining information about the physics of fault rupture. Source inversion requires the spatial discretization of fault, which can be performed uniformly and non-uniformly. Uniform fault discretization is a conventional approach that requires smoothing and/or non-negative constraints of slips as prior information to obtain a stable and reliable solution; however, the combination of uniform discretization and these prior constraints may distort a source-inversion solution. As a non-uniform discretization approach, source inversion using a trans-dimensional inversion approach has recently attracted attention. To study the effect of fault discretization on geodetic source inversion, through the analysis of geodetic data on the 2015 Gorkha, Nepal, earthquake and synthetic tests, we investigated what kind of solution the conventional source inversion with uniform discretization and the trans-dimensional source inversion provide and what kind of uncertainty their solutions have. We found that the combination of uniform discretization and non-negative constraint led to excessively smooth solutions with poor data fit. Even without using the non-negative constraint, the conventional inversion with uniform discretization provided distorted and sometimes overfitted solutions, which could not be identified based on uncertainty information. In contrast, the trans-dimensional source inversion provided reasonable solutions composed only of meaningful slips, which were required to explain the data. We also found that uncertainty information depends on the source-inversion method; consequently, the evaluation of method-induced uncertainty is difficult. This suggests that we look at earthquake ruptures through the lens of source inversion with inherent method-dependent bias.