A Study of Low-Frequency Earthquake Magnitudes in Northern Vancouver Island

Abstract:

Tectonic tremor and low frequency earthquakes (LFE) have been extensively studied in recent years in northern Washington and southern Vancouver Island (VI). However, far less attention has been directed to northern VI where the behavior of tremor and LFEs is less well documented. We investigate LFE properties in this latter region by assembling templates using data from the POLARIS-NVI and Sea-JADE experiments. The POLARIS-NVI experiment comprised 27 broadband seismometers arranged along two mutually perpendicular arms with an aperture of ~60 km centered near station WOS (lat. 50.16, lon. -126.57). It recorded two ETS events in June 2006 and May 2007, each with duration less than a week. For these two episodes, we constructed 68 independent, high signal to noise ratio LFE templates representing spatially distinct asperities on the plate boundary in NVI, along with a catalogue of more than 30 thousand detections. A second data set is being prepared for the complementary 2014 Sea-JADE data set. The precisely located LFE templates represent simple direct P-waves and S-waves at many stations thereby enabling magnitude estimation of individual detections. After correcting for radiation pattern, 1-D geometrical spreading, attenuation and free-surface magnification, we solve a large, sparse linear system for 3-D path corrections and LFE magnitudes for all detections corresponding to a single LFE template. LFE magnitudes range up to 2.54, and like southern VI are characterized by high b-values (b~8). In addition, we will quantify LFE moment-duration scaling and compare with southern Vancouver Island where LFE moments appear to be controlled by slip, largely independent of fault area.