Millimeter-level ultra-long period multiple Earth-circling surface waves retrieved from dense high-rate GPS network

Abstract

High-rate GPS networks have proven to be capable of continuously recording strong ground motion, which is valuable for studying earthquake rupture processes and seismic hazard mitigation. Previous studies of high-rate GPS usually resolved dynamic ground displacements of some major seismic phases stronger than a few millimeters. In this study, we explore the feasibility of retrieving much weaker ground motions (sub-millimeter) in long duration records by stacking high-rate GPS network. We processed data of the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake recorded by more than 600 high-rate GPS stations of the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) and analyzed kinematic displacement results with seismic array methods. From these high-rate GPS seismograms, we identified abundant seismic phases, not only including clear body waves such as multiple S waves (S, SS, SSS, SSSS traveling along minor/major great circle arc, and SSSSSS beyond 360 degrees), but also the R1–R5 Rayleigh waves and G1–G6 Love waves, some of which travel around the Earth multiple times. Many of these seismic phases have not been reported by previous high-rate GPS studies. The group velocity dispersion curves extracted from multiple earth-circling Love waves of high-rate GPS are consistent with those of broadband seismic records in the period from 150 to 600 s, which can sample the mantle structure down to top of the lower mantle, thus important for understanding interaction between upper mantle and lower mantle. So the dense high-rate GPS networks should be useful for deep mantle research as an additional valuable dataset. With the development of multi-system GNSS and the more precise modeling of error sources, high-rate GNSS data should have great potential for accurately detecting more geodynamic processes with much wider bandwidth in geoscience studies.