Detecting seasonal variations in seismic velocities within Los Angeles basin from correlations of ambient seismic noise.
Résumé
We analyze 3 years of continuous seismic records from broadband stations of the Caltech Regional Seismic Network (CI) in vicinity of the Los Angeles basin. Using correlations of ambient seismic noise, relative velocity variations in the order of 0.1 % can be measured between all inter-station pairs. It is the first time that such an extensive study between 861 inter-station pairs over such a large area has been carried out. We perform these measurements using the 'stretching' technique, assuming that one of the two waveforms is merely a stretched version of the other. Obviously this assumption is always violated and the two waveforms are generally decorrelated due to temporal changes in the Earth crust, due to different sources or simply because the cross-correlations are not fully converged. We investigate the stability of these measurements by repeating each measurement over various time-windows of equal length. On average between all inter-station pairs in the Los Angeles basin a seasonal signal in the relative velocity variation is observed, with peaks and troughs during winter and summer time respectively. Generally the observed signal decreases with increasing inter-station distance and relative travel-time perturbations can only be measured up to an inter-station distance of 60 km. Furthermore the travel-time perturbations do not depend on azimuth of station pairs, suggesting that they are not related to seasonal variations of the noise sources. Performing a simple regionalization by laterally averaging measurements over a subset of stations we found the sedimentary basin showing the most consistent signal and conclude that the observed seasonality might be induced either by changes in the ground-water aquifer or thermo-elastic strain variations that persist down to a depth of 15-22 km.
Domaines
Sciences de la Terre
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