Inversion of the moment-tensor Mrr components of the 2012 Sumatra strike-slip double earthquake using radial normal modes

On April 11, 2012, two strike-slip Sumatra earthquakes with moment magnitudes higher than 8 generated strong, preferentially horizontal, motions. If only body and surface waves are inverted, their centroid-moment-tensor (CMT) parameters producing vertical motions, in particular the Mrr components, are poorly resolved. Independent constraints can be obtained from observations of the radial free-oscillation modes. The signal of radial modes is acquired from four unperturbed superconducting gravimeter records with low noise levels in submillihertz frequency range. We show that the observed signal substantially differs from the synthetic calculations for most of the published CMTs except for the Global CMT solution, which agrees better. We perform modal inversions considering uncertainties in centroid times and calculate marginal posterior probability density function of the Mrr components. The amplitude-spectrum inversion is robust enough to estimate the intervals of admissible Mrr values. Finally, we incorporate also a phase information and reduce the trade-off between the Mrr components of the two studied events.