Tracking velocity changes from ambient noise and repeating airgun shots in Tenerife

Abstract:

Green's functions can be recovered through the cross correlation of ambient seismic noise. These Green's functions can be used to image the subsurface or for monitoring geological settings where we expect rapid seismic velocity changes (e.g. volcanoes, reservoirs). The criterion for the successful recovery of the Green's functions is that the wavefields used for the cross correlation are diffuse. This assumption is fulfilled if either the noise sources are uniformly distributed around the receivers or the scattering in the medium is high enough to mitigate any source directivity. The locations of the noise sources are usually unknown and they change with time. Therefore, apparent changes in seismic wave velocity can be observed which are caused by temporal and spatial changes in the noise source location.

In order to investigate these apparent changes in the Green's functions we undertook an experiment in Tenerife. The experiment was running for 3 months. A small airgun, with exactly known source position, was used as an active source. It was shooting every 15 minutes and several seismic stations laterally and vertically distributed around the airgun recorded the active shots. Coincident to the active shots seismic noise was recorded. Therefore apparent velocity changes measured through the cross correlation of noise can be compared to velocity changes recovered from the repetitive shots. This gives us the opportunity to distinguish between apparent changes due to changes in the noise sources and real velocity changes in the medium. In addition barometric pressure, temperature, rain fall and humidity were recorded in order to avoid misinterpretation of the velocity changes caused by weather fluctuations.