Observational earthquake seismology

Objectives:
The course presents fundamental concepts of observational earthquake seismology with the objective to provide the students with a broad overview. The topics are particularly relevant to students that continue with research within earthquake seismology. However, the concepts and methods taught are also relevant to the general geophysics student interested in Earth structure and dynamics. Students will gain a deeper understanding of approaches such as forward modelling and inversion from the topics addressed within the earthquake seismology context.

Content:
The course gives an introduction to practical methods in earthquake seismology including source, path and receiver. As a starting point some general concepts in earthquake seismology and links to society are discussed. The course gives an introduction into seismic instrumentation and uses the seismometer as an example of a damped oscillator. This is followed by the Earth's structure and the seismic phases that are observed at local to global distances. Various aspects of the earthquake source are presented including the source mechanism. The concepts of waveform forward modelling and moment tensor inversion are discussed. Apart from the fault geometry, the course will also deal with dynamic properties related to the rupture process. Another important topic in seismology is that of earthquake location, which will be dealt with as a classical inverse problem. The course closes with a presentation of seismic attenuation. Python based ecercises that cover mist if these topics are done in parallel with the teaching. In the exercises, students ecperience how to solve problems with real data.

On completion of the course the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge
The student can

• explain general concepts of earthquake seismology, and it's link to society
• explain source, path and receiver as the main components in seismology
• demonstrate how the earthquake mechanism is derived from waveform data
• discuss how the observation of earthquakes leads to improved Earth models
• explain the mathematics behind the approaches that are presented
• demonsrate basic processing of seismograms and solve simple computational problems

Skills
The student can

• discuss the different aspects of inverse problems in earthquake seismology
• assess the quality and uncertainties of earthquake seismology results
• select from different methodological earthquake seismology approaches
• apply earthquake seismology processing tools

General competence
The student can

• communicate basic concepts of earthquake seismology to a non-expert
• discuss scientific matters
• program in Python and access open data through web-services