Single-Station Back-Azimuth Determination with the Receiver Function Rotation Technique Validated by the Locations of Earthquakes, Impacts, and Explosions

Abstract The success of seismometer installations on the ocean floor, polar regions, remote continental areas, and even other planets’ surfaces has sparked renewed interest in determining the location via the azimuthal direction of a seismic event recorded by a single station, also known as the back azimuth (BAZ). However, classical algorithms for the BAZ estimate, like principal component and polarization analyses based on P-wave particle motions, are prone to ambiguities of 180°. Motivated by the sensor orientation correction techniques used for ocean-bottom seismometers and land stations for known event locations, we explore a receiver function rotation (RFR) method to determine the BAZ for events recorded by a single station. It is a parameter search over a range of horizontal component rotation angles from 0° to 360°. The fundamental feature of the method is that the direct P wave in the radial receiver function (RF) will have the maximum amplitude when the rotation from the ZNE system (vertical, north–south, and east–west) to ZRT (vertical, radial, and tangential) is aligned with the BAZ of the incoming P wave. Hence, the largest amplitude at zero time of the ensemble of RFs computed for different horizontal component rotations shows the optimal BAZ, which is consequently free of the 180° ambiguities. The technique’s performance is validated using the well-documented location of the 2017 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea nuclear explosion and over 1200 cataloged earthquakes on the two permanent stations in Australia. We further benchmark the RFR algorithm by the locations of two ground-truth Martian impact events documented by the orbital camera and recorded by InSight’s seismometer. Our method helps enhance the reliability of BAZ estimation as a complementary scheme to other methods. It can be used in remote areas on Earth and on the future missions to the Moon and other planets.