Analytical method of seafloor crustal deformation corresponding to the large scale ocean current region

We monitor seafloor crustal deformation at two observation points (south and north of Nankai Trough (TOA and TCA)) across the Nankai Trough, Japan, from 2013 to 2015. A ocean current flows frequently above our points called the Kuroshio current that has temperature difference perpendicular to the flow axis down to 1000 m in depths. Sound speed in the water depends on temperature (Del Grosso, 1974). Determination of seafloor benchmark position (SBP) has a bias when the sound speed structure includes a horizontal inhomogeneity (HI) in large-scale ocean current area. This bias is caused by trade-off between estimated spatial-temporal variation of sound speed structure and SBP. In this study, we propose a new observation system and analytical method, which directly observe the HI of sound speed derived from Underway CTD (UCTD) measurement and we introduce the HI to analytical method. We performed the observation in May 2015. We measured acoustic ranging during marine navigation on a circle with radius of 2 miles. At the same time, we observed six UCTD measurements down to 700 m in depths at both points. We use analytical method of Ikuta et al. (2008) for determination of SBP and adopt estimated HI of sound speed structure from UCTD measurements. We use the following equation to adopt the HI model: S(t,x,X)=S(t)+ΔS(R(X)+ar(x,X)), where S(t,x,X) is the spatial-temporal variation of slowness but spatial variation is the uniform during the observation period, S(t) is the estimated temporal variation of sound speed structure following Ikuta et al. (2008), ΔS is the horizontal gradient of slowness estimated from UCTD measurement, R(x) is the distance of a ship from center of three SBPs, r(x,X) is the distance between ship position and benchmark position, a is the ratio of layer of HI for the whole depth, x is the ship position, and X is the benchmark position. SBP adopted the HI model is determined 74.9 cm toward N17.4˚E at TCA and 90.0 cm toward N7.8˚E at TOA. The direction of the displacements are consistent with the estimated HI axis derived from UCTD measurement and the value of the displacements are the same order of magnitude as Muto et al. (2008). RMS of traveltime residual decreases from 0.089 to 0.052 ms at TCA and from 0.108 to 0.099ms at TOA. In this result, we improve precision of SBP in the large-scale ocean current area.