Deformation and Seismicity Within the Salton Trough

We examine ground deformation and seismicity within the Salton Trough of Southern California with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). The Salton Trough is the landward extension of the spreading centers and transforms within the Gulf of California, and is associated with a higher heat flow than is found further north along the San Andreas system. The Salton Trough region is characterized by seismicity swarms similar to those that are characteristic of fault systems on the East Pacific Rise. Transient episodes of shallow and deep creep occur on the southern San Andreas, Imperial, and Superstition Hills faults, and pronounced afterslip and triggered slip are associated with local and regional earthquakes. Documentation of the temporal and spatial evolution of transient and triggered slip phenomena is vital to development of stress transfer and strain partitioning models explaining the dynamics of interactions within the North America-Pacific plate boundary. We determine the extent to which aseismic fault slip can be observed with SAR data, and perform specific investigations of the time periods surrounding several of the ~10 major earthquake swarms that have occurred within the Salton Trough since 1992. We seek to determine whether seismic swarm activity is associated with aseismic slip transients. Extensive agricultural activity in the region limits the utility of traditional InSAR, so we explore use of the persistent scatterer method to isolate roads, buildings and other features that retain interferometric coherence over time. Because a large number of SAR acquisitions are available (>30), and because of the large spatial and temporal variations in coherence between urban, agricultural, water-covered and desert landscapes within the scene, the Salton trough provides an interesting test scenario for the persistent scatterer method. We use spatially and temporally varying fault slip to model observed activity on the Superstition Hills fault. We explore methods for including the structure of atmospheric water vapor variations in inversions using phase observations at persistent scatterers. Although the source of deformation is equivocal, since extensive groundwater pumping can produce similar signals, our modeling provides a test scenario describing the types of confidence intervals that we can place on inversions of persistent scatterer data.