Seismic Noise Auto-Correlation Function Changes Correlate with the Crustal Deformation for off-Izu Seismic Swarms

Seismic swarms accompanied by crustal deformation have repeatedly occurred in the off-Izu peninsula region, central part of Japan. In the case of the recent 2006 and 2009 earthquake swarms, the NIED Hi-net stations detected clear accompanying tilt changes, which were interpreted as magma intrusions into the shallower crust, based on a dyke model (e.g., Okada et al., 2000). Recently, seismic noise Auto-Correlation Function (ACF) studies have been carried out intensively to detect possible temporal changes of crustal properties in regions of large earthquakes or at volcanoes (e.g., Wegler and Sens-Schonfelder, 2007). In this study we obtained ACFs by processing continuous seismic waveform data recorded by the Hi-net ITOH station, located closely to the Izu swarm area, and correlated the temporal changes of ACFs with the tilt records at the same station. We also investigated the possibility of continuous monitoring using ACFs and tilt records. We divided the continuous waveform data of 100 Hz sampling into segments of 5 minutes length, removed the mean and trend, and applied band-pass filtering and one-bit normalization, followed by auto-correlation. After that, we stacked the ACFs for a day to obtain stable ACF records. The temporal changes of ACFs versus time are analyzed by considering a reference ACF, which is the mean of ACFs for the time period without major seismic swarms. The tilt records were corrected for the tidal elements using the BAYTAP-G software (Tamura et al., 1991). After this processing, we determined the coherency between the temporal changes of ACF and tilt records. Usually the ACFs and the tilt records had separate, uncorrelated changes. The variety of changes suggests that the ACFs amplitudes and the tilt records were sensitive not only to crustal changes caused by seismic swarms or magma intrusion. However, just before the seismic swarm in December 2009, the coherency between the temporal changes of ACFs and tilt records started to be higher. The higher coherency shown around the seismic swarm periods were rare case, spanning less than 5% of the total observation time. It is difficult to pinpoint the causes for the individual temporal changes of ACFs amplitude and tilt. However, the temporal changes of ACFs have been seldom correlated with the tilt records except for the seismic swarm periods. Magma intrusion could explain both the crustal deformations and changes of crustal properties at which ACFs are particularly sensitive. It can be also the triggering factor for the swarm activity itself, as discussed in previous research. These observations stress out the importance of continuous monitoring of crustal deformations, and may produce important information for the prediction of seismic swarm occurrence.