On planar seismic wavefront modeling for estimating rotational ground motions: Case of 2-D SH line-source

At large hypocentral distances, it is convenient to approximate the curved transient seismic wavefronts as planar to estimate rotational ground motions from the single-station recordings of translational ground motions. In this paper, we investigate whether and when this approximation, referred to as the ‘plane-wave’ approximation, can be considered adequate close to the source. For this, we consider a simplistic source model comprising a two-dimensional, kinematic shear dislocation SH line-source buried in a homogenous, elastic half-space and assume this to be an equivalent representation of a finite-sized fault. The ‘plane-wave’ rotational motion is then synthesized from the exact translational motion solution to the assumed model and compared with the exact rotational motion solution for this model. The comparison between the two sets of rotational amplitudes in frequency domain suggests that the plane-wave approximation may be adequate, when the wavelengths of the seismic waves are much smaller than the source depth. When this is not true, the plane-wave approximation is seen to underestimate the Fourier amplitudes close to the source by several orders, particularly when the fault planes are vertically oriented. A similar comparison in the time domain indicates that a severe underestimation may also occur when the source rise time is longer than the shear-wave arrival time at the epicenter. Significant discrepancies are also observed between the waveforms of the exact and plane-wave rotational motions.