Earthquake Weather: Linking Seismicity to Changes in Barometric Pressure, Earth Tides, and Rainfall

Abstract:

It has been widely observed that earthquakes can be triggered due to changes in stress induced by the passage of surface waves from remote earthquakes. These stress changes are typically on the order of a few kiloPascals and occur over time spans of seconds. Less well investigated is the question of whether triggering of seismic activity can result from similar stress changes occurring over periods of hours or days due to changing barometric pressure, rainfall, and Earth tides. Past studies have shown a possible link between these stress sources and slow earthquakes in Taiwan (Hsu et al., 2015).

Here, we investigate the relationship between seismicity and changing barometric pressure, Earth tides, and rainfall for four regions of the western United States where regional seismic networks provide high-quality seismic catalogs over relatively long time periods: Southern California, Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and Utah. For each region we obtained seismic catalogs from January 2001 through September 2014 and acquired hourly data for barometric pressure and rainfall across the regions from the National Climatic Data Center. The vertical stress time series due to Earth tides was computed for the location of each weather station in the study areas. We summed the stresses from these 3 sources and looked for variations in seismicity correlated to the stress changes.

We show that seismicity rates increase with increasing magnitude of stress change. In many cases the increase in seismicity is larger for reductions in vertical stress than it is for stress increases. We speculate that the dependency of seismic rate on combined vertical stress is acting through a combination of two mechanisms: (1) Reduced stresses reduce the normal force on faults, triggering failure in critically-stressed faults. (2) Increased stresses may similarly reduce the normal force on faults due to increases in pore pressure induced in the fault region.