A Study of Low Frequency Earthquakes in Washington State

In the past decade, studies have shown that non-volcanic tremor in southwest Japan can be explained by swarms of low frequency earthquakes (LFEs). More recently LFEs have been identified and documented in southern Vancouver Island. Here we extend study of LFEs to Washington state by exploiting data from the IRIS-PASCAL CAFE experiment. We use network autocorrelation to detect LFEs within 4 different tremor episodes (2007,2008,2010 and 2011). We separate the dataset into 2 components, one involving stations between the Olympic Peninsula and Puget Sound (North Group) and the other involving stations to the south of Puget Sound (South Group). For the South Group, only the 2007 and 2008 tremor episodes are available. From an initial 4915 (North Group) and 3306 (South Group) detections of LFEs using a set of 7 3-components stations, we use iterative network cross-correlation to register further detections and stack to improve signal-to-noise ratio of LFE family templates. On the basis of progress to date, we anticipate the assembly of ~150 and ~50 LFE family templates for the North and South Groups, respectively. We plan to locate these LFE family templates, determine representative focal mechanisms and investigate LFE occurrence relative to regular seismicity for comparison with previous results from southern Vancouver Island and southwest Japan.