Orientation of broadband seismographs in the Kashmir Himalaya: Effect on vector-based studies

We used regional as well as global Rayleigh wave signals (source-receiver distance: 5°-175°; M≥ 6, Depth ≤ 150 km) recorded at 12 broadband seismic stations in northwestern Himalaya to compute arrival angles of surface waves at each station, assuming orthogonality of the horizontal components, and error-free levelling of the instrument. The average of all measurements at a station with cross-correlation values > 0.8, between Hilbert transformed vertical and radial components, was interpreted as the degree of misalignment of the horizontal components in a geographic frame of reference.

Out of the 12 station data used in this analysis, 3 were found to have instrument misorientation errors between 5° and 10° w.r.t geographic north, 2 between 10° and 15° and the remaining 7 < 5°. The number of measurements at each of these stations ranged from 75 to 331, with 11 stations having more than 90 measurements, assuring high reliability. We also analysed data from two nearby broadband instruments located in Ladakh Himalaya. One of these (LEH) with 46 measurements showed a misorientation error of 14.87°±4.87° and the other (HNL) with 48 showed an error of 0.75°±3.48°. Since misorientation errors based on less than 90 data elements are considered to be unstable, these were not used for further analysis.

We evaluated the effect of seismograph misorientations on the inverted solutions for P-wave receiver functions (RFs) and core-refracted shear waves (SKS). The errors in Moho depths and those of other intra-crustal features were within ±2 km for instrument misorientations of up to ~15°, that is close to the resolution errors. But, the SKS results, notably the azimuths of the fast component, were, found to be quite sensitive to instrument misalignment. For example, a ~14° error in orientation was found to cause a shift of up to 20° in the calculated azimuth of the fast component. Corrections of misorientation errors in both cases showed reduction of variance in the inverted solutions.