Rayleigh wave group-velocity across the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico from ambient noise tomography

The eastern North America-Caribbean (NA-CAR) plate boundary near the islands of Hispaniola (which is comprised of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Puerto Rico is a complex transition zone in which strain is accommodated by two transform fault systems and oblique subduction. In 2013, scientists from Baylor University, the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, and the Puerto Rico Seismic Network deployed 16 broadband stations on the Dominican Republic to expand the local permanent network. The goal of the Greater Antilles Seismic Program (GrASP) is to combine its data with that from permanent networks in Puerto Rico, Haiti, Cuba, the Cayman Islands, and Jamaica to develop a better understanding of the crust and upper mantle structure in the Northeastern Caribbean (Greater Antilles). One important goal of GrASP is to develop robust velocity models that can be used to improve earthquake location and seismic hazard efforts. In this study, we focus on obtaining Rayleigh wave group velocity maps from ambient noise tomography. By cross-correlating ambient seismic noise recorded at 53 stations between 2010 to present, we obtain Green's functions between 1165 pairs of stations. From these, we obtain dispersion curves by the application of FTAN methods with phase-matched filtering. Selection criteria depend on the signal-to-noise ratio and seasonal variability, with further filtering done by rejecting velocities incompatible with maps produced from overdamped tomographic inversions. Preliminary dispersion maps show strong correlations with large-scale geological and tectonic features for periods between 5 - 20 s, such as the Cordillera Central in both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, the Mona Passage, and the NA-CAR subduction zone. Ongoing efforts focus on including shorter periods in Puerto Rico as its denser station distribution could allow us to retrieve higher resolution group velocity maps.