Sponsored by National Nuclear Security Administration

The development of accurate numerical methods to simulate wave propagation in three-dimensional (3D) earth models and advances in computational power offer exciting possibilities for modeling the motions excited by underground nuclear explosions. This presentation will describe recent work to use new numerical techniques and parallel computing to model earthquakes and underground explosions to improve understanding of the wave excitation at the source and path-propagation effects. Firstly, we are using the spectral element method (SEM, SPECFEM3D code of Komatitsch and Tromp, 2002) to model earthquakes and explosions at regional distances using available 3D models. SPECFEM3D simulates anelastic wave propagation in fully 3D earth models in spherical geometry with the ability to account for free surface topography, anisotropy, ellipticity, rotation and gravity. Results show in many cases that 3D models are able to reproduce features of the observed seismograms that arise from path-propagation effects (e.g., enhanced surface wave dispersion, refraction, amplitude variations from focusing and defocusing, tangential component energy from isotropic sources). We are currently investigating the ability of different 3D models to predict path-specific seismograms as a function of frequency. A number of models developed using a variety of methodologies are available for testing. These include the WENA/Unified model of Eurasia (e.g. Pasyanos et al 2004), the global CUB 2.0 model (Shapiro and Ritzwoller, 2002), the partitione