Exploiting Signal Coherence to Simultaneously Detect and Locate Earthquakes

Abstract

Abstract This study introduces an earthquake detection and location technique that exploits the spatial coherence of the seismic wavefield. The method leverages the signal coherence across clusters of seismic stations to generate characteristic functions that are backprojected (migrated) to detect and locate seismic events. The effectiveness of the technique is assessed using a limited set of stations from the Oklahoma wavefield experiment, with minimal tuning of processing parameters. The technique is then applied to one day of continuous data, leading to the detection of new seismic events compared with an analyst-based catalog. Noteworthy advantages of this method include its independence from prior information or assumptions (such as template waveform) and its ability to operate effectively with a network design for which seismometers are deployed in a relatively small number of clusters rather than distributed throughout a region.