Temporal changes of surface wave velocity associated with major Sumatra earthquakes from ambient noise correlation

Detecting temporal changes of the medium associated with major earthquakes has implications for understanding earthquake genesis. Here we report temporal changes of surface wave velocity over a large area associated with 3 major Sumatra earthquakes in 2004, 2005, and 2007. We use ambient noise correlation to retrieve empirical Green's function (EGF) of surface waves between stations. Because the process is completely repeatable, the technique is powerful in detecting possible temporal change of medium. We find that 1 excellent station pair (PSI in Indonesia and CHTO in Thailand) shows significant time shifts (up to 1.44 s) after the 2004 and 2005 events in the Rayleigh waves at 10-20 s but not in the Love waves, suggesting that the Rayleigh time shifts are not from clock error. The time shifts are frequency dependent with the largest shifts at the period band of 11-16 s. We also observe an unusual excursion similar to 1 month before the 2004 event. We obtain a total of 17 pairs for June, 2007 to June, 2008, which allow us to examine the temporal and spatial variation of the time shifts. We observed strong anomalies (up to 0.68 s) near the epicenter after the 2007 event, but not in the region further away from the source or before the event or 3 months after the event. The observations are interpreted as stress changes and subsequent relaxation in upper-mid crust in the immediate vicinity of the rupture and the broad area near the fault zone.