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Gravitational-wave detectors have begun to observe coalescences of heavyblack holes at a consistent pace for the past few years. Accurate models ofgravitational waveforms are essential for unbiased and precise estimation ofsource parameters. Recently developed surrogate models based on high-accuracynumerical relativity (NR) simulations are ideal for constraining physicalparameters of heavy black hole merger events. In this paper, we firstdemonstrate the viability of these multi-modal surrogates as reliable parameterestimation tools. We show that NR surrogates can extract additional informationfrom GW data that is inaccessible to traditional models, by analyzing a set ofsynthetic signals with the NR surrogate and other approximants.  We also consider the case of two of the earliest binary black holes detectedby the LIGO observatories: GW150914 and GW170104. We reanalyze their data withfully-precessing NR-surrogate templates and freely provide the resultingposterior samples as supplemental material. We find that our refined analysisis able to extract information from sub-dominant GW harmonics in data, andtherefore better resolve the degeneracy in measuring source luminosity distanceand orbital inclination for both events. We estimate the sources of both eventsto be 20-25% further away than was previously estimated. Our analyses alsoconstrain their orbital orientation more tightly around face-on or face-offconfigurations than before. Additionally, for GW150914 we constrain theeffective inspiral spin more tightly around zero. This work is one of the firstto unambiguously extract sub-dominant GW mode information from real events. Itis also a first step toward eliminating the approximations used insemi-analytic waveform models from GW parameter estimation. It also motivatesthat NR surrogates be extended to cover more of the binary black hole parameterspace.

Constraining the parameters of GW150914 & GW170104 with numerical relativity surrogates