Preliminary Ambient Noise and Seismic Interferometry Analysis of the Laguna del Maule Volcanic Field, Chile

Abstract:

Laguna del Maule Volcanic Field is a large, restless, youthful rhyolitic system in the Southern Andes of Chile. We present a preliminary examination of ambient noise data at this site from 12 University of Wisconsin and 6 OVDAS (Southern Andean Volcano Observatory) broadband seismometers for a 3 month period. Ambient noise tomography seeks to correlate pairs of stations, with one station acting as a virtual source and the other a receiver, generating empirical Green’s functions between each pair. The noise correlation functions (NCFs) were computed for day-long and hour-long windows, then the final NCFs were obtained from stacking each time window set. The hour-long NCFs converged more rapidly, so this time window was chosen for use in later stages. This study used phase weighted stacking of the NCFs instead of linear stacking in order to achieve a better signal to noise ratio (SNR), although linearly stacked Green’s functions were also created to confirm the improvement. Phase weighted stacking can detect signals with weak amplitudes much more clearly than linear stacking by finding coherence of signals in multiple frequency bins and down-weighting the importance of amplitude for correlation (Schimmel and Gallart, 2007). The Frequency-Time Analysis Technique was utilized to measure group velocity, and initial results show it to be about 2 km/s on average. Fluctuations of the average velocity between different station pairs across this dense array will provide a preliminary indication of the location and size of the magma system. This study also applied seismic interferometry using ambient noise to determine temporal changes in seismic velocity occurring at Laguna del Maule. Initial results show temporal changes in seismic velocity correlated to seasonal changes in the hydrologic cycle (rain, snow pack, snow melt, etc.). Current work focuses on identifying changes in seismic velocity associated with ongoing volcanic processes.