AutoCoulomb: Program for flexibly calculating Coulomb stress changes on receiver faults with any orientation and nonvertical profiles with any trend

Abstract:

Earthquakes can arouse changes in surrounding crustal stresses. These changes can in turn promote or inhibit the occurrences of subsequent earthquakes. To quantify the changes in stresses, the Coulomb failure model is often employed to compute Coulomb stress changes imparted by mainshocks. Based on the Coulomb failure model, here we present a program that can be used to calculate Coulomb stress changes on nodal planes of focal mechanisms, profiles, optimally oriented failure planes (OOPs) and major faults. This program makes use of the advantage of the shell command-line tool to automatically batch process Coulomb stress changes on various sorts of receiver fault planes provided that the input files of source fault models and sampling grids are prepared. Our program is expected to be of great benefit for furthering insights into earthquake stress triggerings and fault interactions in the near future through automatic and routine Coulomb stress analyses.