High Spatial Density Ambient Noise Tomography at the El Jefe Geyser, Chile

Abstract:

The El Jefe geyser in the Atacama Desert, Chile has been the subject of study to better understand processes of heat transport and eruption mechanisms in geyser systems (Munoz-Saez et al., 2015). Existing seismological literature on geyser and volcanic systems is predominantly focused on seismicity generated in the eruptive process (Benoit and McNutt, 1997; O’Brien et al., 2011). In contrast, this study leverages seismic noise in the repose period to generate an approximation to the Green’s function for each receiver pair, known as noise correlation functions (NCFs). A dense seismic array of 51 geophones spaced at 2-10 meter intervals recorded several days of data at a spatial scale and frequency range approximately two orders of magnitude removed from prior seismic interferometry studies. While eruptions of the El Jefe geyser impose a transient signal on a diffuse background noise, a regular eruption interval of 132.52.5 seconds (Munoz-Saez et al., 2015) allows for reliable removal of seismic energy associated with the eruption, improving the azimuthal distribution of noise across the array.
The approach to generating noise correlation functions closely follows the methodology of Seats and Lawrence (2014). Moveout of at least two phases of energy is apparent in the calculated NCFs, suggesting that multiple phases of seismic energy may be present in the noise, moving coherently across the array.