Time-Lapse Monitoring of Daily Velocity Changes in Binchuan, Southwestern China, Using Large-Volume Air-Gun Source Array Data

Abstract

Abstract Temporal changes of seismic velocities in the Earth’s crust can be induced by stress perturbations or material damage from reasons such as strong ground motion, volcanic activities, and atmospheric effects. However, monitoring the temporal changes remains challenging, because most of them generally exist in small travel-time differences of seismic data. Here, we present an excellent case of daily variations of the subsurface structure detected using a large-volume air-gun source array of one-month experiment in Binchuan, Yunnan, southwestern China. The seismic data were recorded by 12 stations within ∼10 km away from the source and used to detect velocity change in the crust using the deconvolution method and sliding window cross-correlation method, which can eliminate the “intercept” error when cutting the air-gun signals and get the real subsurface variations. Furthermore, the multichannel singular spectral analysis method is used to separate the daily change (∼1 cycle per day) from the “long-period” change (<1 cycle per day) or noise. The result suggests that the daily velocity changes at the two nearest stations, 53277 (offset ∼700 m) and 53278 (offset ∼2.3 km), are well correlated with air temperature variation with a time lag of 5.0 ± 1.5 hr, which reflects that the velocity variations at the subsurface are likely attributed to thermoelastic strain. In contrast, both daily and long-period velocity changes at distant stations correlate better with the varying air pressure than the temperature, indicating that the velocity variations at deeper depth are dominated by the elastic loading of air pressure. Our results demonstrate that the air-gun source is a powerful tool to detect the velocity variation of the shallow crust media.