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Detection of Subtle Hydromechanical Medium Changes Caused By a Small-Magnitude Earthquake Swarm in NE Brazil

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Abstract

Ambient noise correlation analyses are largely used in seismology to map heterogeneities and to monitor the temporal evolution of seismic velocity changes associated mostly with stress field variations and/or fluid movements. Here we analyse a small earthquake swarm related to a main mR 3.7 intraplate earthquake in North-East of Brazil to study the corresponding post-seismic effects on the medium. So far, post-seismic effects have been observed mainly for large magnitude events. In our study, we show that we were able to detect localized structural changes even for a small earthquake swarm in an intraplate setting. Different correlation strategies are presented and their performances are also shown. We compare the classical auto-correlation with and without pre-processing, including 1-bit normalization and spectral whitening, and the phase auto-correlation. The worst results were obtained for the pre-processed data due to the loss of waveform details. The best results were achieved with the phase cross-correlation which is amplitude unbiased and sensitive to small amplitude changes as long as there exist waveform coherence superior to other unrelated signals and noise. The analysis of 6 months of data using phase auto-correlation and cross-correlation resulted in the observation of a progressive medium change after the major recorded event. The progressive medium change is likely related to the swarm activity through opening new path ways for pore fluid diffusion. We further observed for the auto-correlations a lag time frequency-dependent change which likely indicates that the medium change is localized in depth. As expected, the main change is observed along the fault.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia—Estudos Tectônicos (INCT-ET/CNPq) and the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia—Geofísica do Petróleo (INCT-ET/CNPq). V. D’hour and H. Lima Neto thank CAPES for their PhD grants. A. Nascimento and J. Ferreira thank CNPq for their PQ grants. M. Schimmel thanks the Science without Borders Programme for his PVE grant and CGL2013-48601-C2-1-R. V. D’hour also thanks the Science without Borders Programme for allowing the sponsored period of 1 year in Barcelona, Spain. The authors also thank Eduardo Menezes for this valuable work in the data acquisition period, and the editor and the 2 reviewers for their careful and constructive reviews.

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  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geodinâmica e Geofísica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Campus Universitário, Natal, RN, 59078-970, Brazil

    V. D’Hour, A. F. Do Nascimento, J. M. Ferreira & H. C. Lima Neto

  2. Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera—CSIC, Lluis Sole i Sabaris s/n, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    M. Schimmel

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  1. V. D’Hour
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D’Hour, V., Schimmel, M., Do Nascimento, A.F. et al. Detection of Subtle Hydromechanical Medium Changes Caused By a Small-Magnitude Earthquake Swarm in NE Brazil. Pure Appl. Geophys. 173, 1097–1113 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-015-1156-0

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