Several hundred finite element analyses of an inversion of earthquake fault slip distribution using a high-fidelity model of the crustal structure

To improve the accuracy of inverse analysis of earthquake fault slip distribution, we performed several hundred analyses using a 108-degree-of-freedom finite element (FE) model of the crustal structure in an efficient way based on capacity computing. we developed a meshing method and an efficient computational method for these large FE models, which methods are specialized for the problem setting. We applied the model to the inverse analysis of coseismic fault slip distribution for the 2011 Tohoku-oki Earthquake. The high resolution of our model provided a significant improvement of the fidelity of the simulation results compared to existing computational approaches.