Detecting remotely triggered temporal changes around the Parkfield section of the San Andreas fault

Abstract

Detecting temporal changes in fault zone properties at seismogenic depth have been a long-sought goal in the seismological community for many decades. Recent studies based on waveform analysis of repeating earthquakes have found clear temporal changes in the shallow crust and around active fault zones associated with the occurrences of large nearby and teleseismic earthquakes. However, repeating earthquakes only occur in certain locations and their occurrence times cannot be controlled, which may result in inadequate sampling of the interested regions or time periods. Recent developments in passive imaging via auto- and cross-correlation of ambient seismic wavefields (e.g., seismic noise, earthquake coda waves) provide an ideal source for continuous monitoring of temporal changes around active fault zones. Here we conduct a systematic search of temporal changes along the Parkfield section of the San Andreas fault by cross-correlating relatively high-frequency (0.4-1.3 Hz) ambient noise signals recorded by 10 borehole stations in the High Resolution Seismic Network. After using stretch/compressed method to measure the delay time and the decorrelation-index between the daily noise cross-correlation functions (NCCFs), we find clear temporal changes in the median seismic velocity and decorrelation-index associated with the 2004 M6.0 Parkfield earthquake. We also apply the same procedure to the seismic data around five regional/teleseismic events that have triggered non-volcanic tremor in the same region, but failed to find any clear temporal changes in the daily NCCFs. The fact that our current technique can detect temporal changes from the nearby but not regional and teleseismic events, suggests that temporal changes associated with distance sources are very subtle or localized so that they could not be detected within the resolution of the current technique (-0.2%). © 2010 The Seismological Society of China and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.