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The Influence of Geography and Geology in Seismic Background Noise Levels Across the United States as Revealed by the Transportable Array

Session: Applications and Technologies in Large-Scale Seismic Analysis

Type: Oral

Date: 4/23/2021

Presentation Time: 02:00 PM Pacific

Description: 

The EarthScope USArray Transportable Array (TA) has now covered the US with 3-component broadband seismometers at approximately 70 km station spacing and deployment durations of approximately 2 years. This unprecedented coverage, combined with high-quality and near homogenous installation techniques, offers a novel dataset in which to characterize spatially varying levels of background seismic noise across the United States. We present background noise maps in period bands of interest to earthquake and imaging seismology across the US (lower 48 states and Alaska). Early results from the contiguous 48 states demonstrate that ambient noise levels within the body wave period band (1-5 s) vary by > 20 dB (rel. 1 (m/s²)²/Hz) with the highest noise levels occurring at stations located within sedimentary basins and lowest within the mountain ranges of the Western US. Additionally, stations around the Great Lakes observe heightened noise levels in this band beyond the aforementioned basin amplification. We attribute this observation to local swell activity in the Great Lakes generating short-period microseism signals. This suggests that lake-generated microseisms may be a significant source of noise for Alaskan deployments situated in close proximity to lakes to facilitate float plane access. We further investigate how basin amplification and short-period lake microseism signals may noticeably impact detection and signal-to-noise of teleseismic body wave signals during certain time periods. At longer-periods (> 20 s), we generally observe larger noise levels on the horizontal components of stations situated in basins or on soft sediment, likely caused by locally induced tilt of the sensor. We will present similar analysis from the initial Alaska TA dataset to quantitatively assess how utilization of posthole sensors affects signal-to-noise for the long-period horizontal wavefield.

Presenting Author: Robert Anthony

Student Presenter: No

Authors