Numerical Tests to Evaluate the Effect of Constraining the Spectral Shape of Reference Events on Source Parameter Scaling

Extracting source parameters from recorded spectra requires correction for attenuation effects. In consideration of the trade-off between source and propagation effects, various strategies have been proposed to constrain the inverse problem with a priori assumptions. The objective of this study is to assess the impact of constraining the source spectra of reference earthquakes in an attempt to remove a common unknown term from the spectral decomposition results. We perform numerical analyses to simulate the outcomes of the decomposition by generating source spectra for different stress drop versus seismic moment scaling, considering a large population of earthquakes with moment magnitudes between 1.8 and 6.5. Following the strategy of constraining the corner frequency of reference events, we evaluate the error of the retrieved source parameters when the applied constraint shows different levels of discrepancy with respect to the assumption used to generate the synthetics. The numerical...