Validation and Joint Inversion of Teleseismic Waveforms for Earthquake Source Models Using Deep Ocean Bottom Pressure Records: A Case Study of the 2006 Kuril Megathrust Earthquake

The importance of accurate tsunami simulation has increased since the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami that followed it, because it is an important tool for inundation mapping and, potentially, tsunami warning. An important source of uncertainty in tsunami simulations is the source model, which is often estimated from some combination of seismic, geodetic or geological data. A magnitude 8.3 earthquake that occurred in the Kuril subduction zone on 15 November, 2006 resulted in the first teletsunami to be widely recorded by bottom pressure recorders deployed in the northern Pacific Ocean. Because these recordings were unaffected by shallow complicated bathymetry near the coast, this provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether seismic rupture models can be inferred from teleseismic waves with sufficient accuracy to be used to forecast teletsunami. In this study, we estimated the rupture model of the 2006 Kuril earthquake by inverting the teleseimic waves and used that to model the tsunami source. The tsunami propagation was then calculated by solving the linear long-wave equations. We found that the simulated 2006 Kuril tsunami compared very well to the ocean bottom recordings when simultaneously using P and long-period surface waves in the earthquake source process inversion.