Using Seismic Arrays to Detect Triggered and Ambient Tremor in Taiwan

Deep tectonic tremor triggered by teleseismic surface waves have been recently observed in the southern Central Range in Taiwan, an arc-continental type collision environment. Aiming to capture more tremor events, we installed two dense 36-element, small-aperture seismic arrays in 2011 around the Liouguei and Lidao areas, which are located about 20 km in southwest and northeast to the tremor sources. In each array, short-period, vertical-channel GS-11D sensors with 4.5Hz natural frequency seismometers were laid out on the relatively flat parts of the mountain areas with a spacing of approximately 100 by 80 meters. We had successfully recorded continuously for a total of 4,034 hours in 2011. As expected, the two arrays recorded tremor bursts triggered by the great Tohoku earthquake (Mw=9.0) on March 11, 2011. We apply the broadband frequency wavenumber (BBFK) beamforming method to measure the back-azimuth and incident angles for each tremor burst and through the whole data set. Our initial results show that obtained array parameters closely match those predicted from locations using tremor envelope cross-correlations (WECC) and we detect more tremor duration by BBFK than WECC. We further use a moving-window grid-search (MWGS) method to detect regular earthquakes. Our result indicates the southwestern array provides more stable results than the northeastern array. Our next step is to apply the same MWGS procedure to detect ambient tremor recorded by the southwestern array. Our systematic analysis of deep tremor in Taiwan could help to better understand critical conditions related to tremor occurrence and fault mechanics at the bottom of the seismogenic layer.