Strong Wen

The vertical propagation of disturbances triggered by seismic waves of the 11 March 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquake over Taiwan

In this paper, concurrent/colocated measurements of seismometers, infrasonic systems, magnetometers, HF-CW (high frequency-continuous wave) Doppler sounding systems, and GPS receivers are employed to detect disturbances triggered by seismic waves of the 11 March 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquake. No time delay between colocated infrasonic (i.e., super long acoustic) waves and seismic waves indicates that the triggered acoustic and/or gravity waves in the atmosphere (or seismo-traveling atmospheric disturbances, STADs) near the Earths surface can be immediately activated by vertical ground motions. The circle method is used to find the origin and compute the observed horizontal traveling speed of the triggered infrasonic waves. The speed of about 3.3 km/s computed from the arrival time versus the epicentral distance suggests that the infrasonic waves (i.e., STADs) are mainly induced by the Rayleigh waves. The agreements in the travel time at various heights between the observation and theoretical calculation suggest that the STADs triggered by the vertical motion of ground surface caused by the Tohoku earthquake traveled vertically from the ground to the ionosphere with speed of the sound in the atmosphere over Taiwan.

Source characteristics of moderate-to-strong earthquakes in the Nantou area, Taiwan: insight from strong ground motion simulations

Abstract In Taiwan, the Nantou area is a seismically active region where several moderate events have occurred, causing some disasters during the past century. Here, we applied the strong ground motion simulation with the empirical Green’s function method to investigate the source characteristics for the eight moderate blind-fault events that struck the Nantou area in 1999 and 2013. The results show that for these Nantou events, a high stress drop and focal depth dependence were noted, which might be related to the immature buried fault in this area. From the viewpoint of seismic hazard prevention and preparation, future earthquake scenarios that include high stress drop should be applied to more analyses, especially the moderate-to-large events originating from the immature blind faulting.Graphical abstract.