Three-Dimensional Deformation of the 2023 Turkey Mw 7.8 and Mw 7.7 Earthquake Sequence Obtained by Fusing Optical and SAR Images

Abstract

In February 2023, Mw 7.8 and Mw 7.7 earthquakes struck southeastern Turkey. Generating a coseismic 3D deformation field that can directly reflect the characteristics of surface deformation is important for revealing the movement mode of a seismogenic fault and analyzing the focal mechanism. Optical image sub-pixel correlation (SPC) only captures deformation in the horizontal direction, and SAR image pixel offset tracking (POT) obtains range deformation that is not sensitive to north–south deformation signals. Thus, neither of them can capture the complete 3D deformation alone. Combining them may be able to allow the monitoring of 3D deformation. In this study, we used Sentinel-2 optical images to obtain the horizontal deformation (east–west and north–south) and Sentinel-1 and ALOS-2 data to extract the range and azimuth offsets. The least-squares method was used to fuse the optical and SAR offsets to obtain the 3D deformation field of the 2023 Turkey earthquake sequence, which indicates that the two events were both left-lateral strike-slip earthquakes. The surface deformation caused by the two large earthquakes is mainly in the east–west direction. In the vertical direction, the two earthquakes caused a small-magnitude uplift and subsidence. The findings in this paper can be used as a reference for the study of coseismic 3D deformation.

Keywords

• Turkey earthquake
• optical image correlation
• pixel offset tracking
• 3D deformation monitoring