Seafloor Crustal Deformation on Ocean Bottom Pressure Records With Nontidal Variability Corrections: Application to Hikurangi Margin, New Zealand

Abstract

AbstractOcean bottom pressure (OBP) observations are a powerful tool for determining vertical crustal displacements, especially due to earthquakes and slow earthquakes, with centimeter‐level resolution. In these studies, removal of oceanographic noise (tens of centimeters) is required to identify centimeter‐level crustal deformation. We undertake barotropic modeling to remove oceanographic signals from data from an OBP array deployed offshore New Zealand in 2014/2015. We show that removing the nontidal component calculated from a barotropic ocean model reduces the variance in the data by about 66% and provides a feasible means to resolve pressure changes due to crustal deformation during the slow slip events. We also discuss the vertical displacements from slow slip events that occurred in late September to mid‐October 2014, and we outline our procedure for processing OBP data.