Ground Truth Location of Earthquakes by Use of Ambient Seismic Noise From a Sparse Seismic Network: A Case Study in Western Australia

The estimated Green’s function (EGF) extracted from the ambient seismic noise cross-correlation function (NCF) enables valuable calibration of surface wave propagation along the path connecting seismic stations. Such calibration is adopted in a new method for ground truth location of earthquakes, achieved from the location relative to a seismic station. The surface wave group travel times were obtained from the NCFs between a station near the earthquake and remote stations. The differential travel times from the NCFs and the surface wave of the earthquake were used in a relative location procedure. When this method was applied to earthquake location with only six seismic stations in western Australia, the location of the Mw 4.1 Kalannie (September 21, 2005) earthquake was found to be accurate to within 2 km compared with the ground truth location with InSAR for which azimuth coverage of seismic stations is preferable. Synthetic tests suggest that the group travel time is slightly affected by focal mechanism and focal depth, thus unknown earthquake source parameters did not introduce substantial bias to earthquake location with the group travel time method.