Characteristics of high-frequency attenuation in the Dead Sea Basin

In this study, we derive the characteristics of high-frequency attenuation and excitation of ground motion for the Dead Sea Basin (DSB) area by regressing the peak amplitudes of narrowband-filtered velocity seismograms measured around the shear wave arrivals. We analyzed about 2000 seismograms from 43 local earthquakes in the magnitude range of M W = 0.9–4.5 that occurred in and around the DSB. The regional crustal attenuation is modeled with a frequency-independent piece-wise continuous linear geometrical spreading function and a frequency-dependent quality parameter Q . Our analysis exhibits that S wave attenuation in the DSB has irregular behavior with the effects of arrivals of supercritical reflections. For distances r ≤ 20 km, the geometrical spreading is 1/ r ; for distances r ≥ 40 km, the geometric attenuation is r −0.4 ; and for distances 20