Tremor Constraints on Moment Release During the 2007 ETS from Surface and Borehole Seismometers

The 2007 ETS event, which began around Jan 15 beneath the southwestern Puget Basin and ended around Feb 5 beneath southern Vancouver Island, was well-recorded on local surface seismic arrays, EarthScope borehole- seismometers, strainmeters and long-baseline tiltmeters, and continuous GPS of the PANGA and PBO networks. Seismic tremor, however, offers the highest resolution for studying moment release through time, since tremor bursts lasting less than 10-seconds are often visible across stations. To test the hypothesis that tremor and transient deformation are two manifestations of the same faulting process, and to quantify the relative contribution of moment release during times of strain-transients versus other times, we systematically analyze the tremor bursts during the time period of 2005-2007.2, which includes the 2007 ETS event. We first consolidate daily seismic files from the Puget Basin of Washington State and SW British Columbia, where GPS density is highest. Seismic traces are included from the PNSN, the PBO borehole seismic network, and the EarthScope-funded CAFE experiment. We remove instrument gain, decimate the data to 10 sps, rectify it, compute its envelope using a Hilbert transform, and average the envelopes from regionally adjacent stations to provide a single metric indicative of tremor activity. This process is effective in quantifying small tremor bursts lacking GPS-inferred deformation and accurately identifies timing and duration of known events. We then compare tremor duration to equivalent moment slip inversions of corresponding GPS-derived deformation to obtain a model that relates hours of tremor to moment magnitude. To locate the tremor during the 2007 event, we use both picked waveform peaks and cross-correlated envelopes of band-pass filtered instruments. The location is determined by minimizing the L2-norm of the vector containing the differences between the measured and predicted stations offsets for a 3D grid of possible locations. Although the scatter is high, particularly in the depth, we find tremor during the 2007 event propagates in a northwesterly direction beneath the eastern Olympics Range over a three-week period. We find no instances of transient GPS deformation occurring in the absence of tremor, and a very linear relationship between tremor duration and GPS-estimated equivalent moment. However, the average amplitude of tremor, both during GPS-recognizable ETS and isolated bursts, varies little from the maximum velocity of ~1 micron/sec.