Abstract
We study the variability of the quality factor with depth (1D model) using S‐wave recordings from regional stations of the Broadband Seismological Network of the Gulf of California (GoC) (RESBAN) operated by Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE). We analyzed earthquakes located by Sumy et al. (2013) in the southern gulf with hypocenters determined using ocean‐bottom seismographs of the Sea of Cortez Ocean Bottom Array (SCOOBA) experiment and onshore stations of the Network of Autonomously Recording Seismographs (NARS)‐Baja array. We also used events relocated by Castro et al. (2017b) in the same region. This catalog of seismicity within the North America–Pacific plate boundary permits us to study the attenuation characteristics of the S waves in greater detail than previous studies, because the new data set samples more densely the gulf region. We determined nonparametric attenuation functions in the 10–250 km distance range to estimate at different frequencies and depths. To estimate , the geometrical spreading function is taken as for and for . We found that at 4 Hz for the first 5 km, increasing to up to 10 km depth, where starts to gradually decrease, reaching a value of between 25 and 40 km depth. This increase in attenuation at 10–40 km depth is consistent with estimates of near the East Pacific Rise (Yang et al., 2007). In general, our average estimates of , which include spreading centers and basins, are higher than those reported in other ridge zones. This indicates that zones of high attenuation in the GoC may be restricted to regions near the spreading centers. We also used the function , which corresponds to the dominance of body waves at all distances, and we found that at low frequencies () this function gives similar values of as those estimated with the spreading function that introduces a weaker decay with distance at .
