Qβ, Qc, Qi, Qs of the Gargano Promontory (Southern Italy)

Abstract

We have provided the first estimate of scat- tering and intrinsic attenuation for the Gargano Prom- ontory (Southern Italy) analyzing 190 local earthquakes with M L ranging from 1.0 to 2.8. To separate the intrin- sic Q i and scattering Q s quality factors with the Wen- nerberg approach (1993), we have measured the direct S waves and coda quality factors ( Q 𝛽 , Q c ) in the same volume of crust. Q 𝛽 parameter is derived with the coda normalization method (Aki 1980) and Q c factor is derived with the coda envelope decay method (Sato 1977). We selected the coda envelope by performing an automatic picking procedure from T start = 1.5T S up to 30 s after origin time (lapse time T L ). All the obtained quality factors clearly increase with frequency. The Q c values correspond to those recently obtained for the area. The estimated Q i are comparable to the Q c at all frequencies and range between 100 and 1000. The Q s parameter shows higher values than Q i , except for 8 Hz, where the two estimates are closer. This implies a pre- dominance of intrinsic attenuation over the scattering attenuation. Furthermore, the similarity between Q i and Q c allows us to interpret the high Q c anomaly previ- ously found in the northern Gargano Promontory up to a depth of 24 km, as a volume of crust characterized by very low seismic dumping produced by conversion of seismic energy into heat. Moreover, most of the earth- quake foci fall in high Q i areas, indicating lower level of anelastic dumping and a brittle behavior of rocks.