Capture of coseismic velocity waveform using GNSS raw Doppler and carrier phase data for enhancing shaking intensity estimation

Abstract

In recent years, coseismic velocity from high-rate global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) carrier phase data has been widely utilized to estimate instrumental seismic intensity, thereby guiding earthquake early warning and emergency response. However, using carrier phase data only yields displacement, displacement increment, and average velocity but not instantaneous velocity at the epoch level. In large earthquakes, using average velocity over a brief time span (e.g., 1 s) to quantify instantaneous coseismic velocity is less reliable for recovering accurate deformation dynamics, especially for the near-field region. In this study, we first introduce GNSS raw Doppler-based instantaneous velocity into seismology, expanding carrier phase-based traditional GNSS seismology. We also propose a new integrated GNSS velocity estimation method that employs a Kalman filter to integrate raw Doppler-based instantaneous velocity and carrier phase-based average velocity. The GNSS data from shake table experiments and two real-world earthquake events (i.e., the 2016 Mw 6.6 Norcia earthquake and the 2011 Mw 9.1 Tohoku-oki earthquake) are used to investigate the impact of high-rate GNSS raw Doppler on capturing coseismic velocity waveforms and predicting instrumental seismic intensity. The simulated sine wave experiment results indicate that the accuracy of instantaneous and average velocity for the 1 Hz sampling rate case is 1.20 cm/s and 12.67 cm/s, respectively. A similar case holds for the simulated quake wave experiment. The retrospective analysis of the ultra-high-rate (20 Hz) GNSS data for the Norcia earthquake shows the average velocities exhibit more aliasing and have a smaller peak ground velocity value than instantaneous velocities in all cases (i.e., 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, and 20 Hz). For the 2011 Mw 9.1 Tohoku-oki earthquake, results show that incorporating raw Doppler data enhances the consistency between the GNSS intensity map and the United States Geological Survey intensity map for near-field regions. Therefore, high-rate GNSS RD data as it becomes more widely available should be incorporated into data processing of high-rate GNSS seismology to capture more accurate instantaneous coseismic velocity waveforms and predict more realistic instrumental seismic intensity in future analyses.