Abstract
Abstract Quantifying the response of human activity to different COVID-19 measures may serve as a potential way to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures and optimize them. Recent studies reported that seismic noise reduction caused by limited human activity due to the COVID-19 lockdown had been observed with seismometers. However, it is difficult for the current seismic infrastructure in urban cities to characterize spatiotemporal seismic noise during the post-COVID-19 lockdown, because of their sparse distribution. Here, we show key connections between progressive COVID-19 measures and spatiotemporal seismic noise changes recorded by a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array deployed in State College, Pennsylvania. We first show a spatiotemporal seismic noise reduction (up to 90%) corresponding to reduced human activity in different city blocks during the stay-at-home period. We also show partial noise recovery corresponding to increased road traffic and industrial machinery in phase yellow and phase green of the lockdown. Nonrecovery seismic noise in the 0.01–10 Hz band suggests the low level of pedestrian movement during phase yellow and phase green. According to a linear correlation between Google mobility change and seismic noise change, we emphasize that DAS recordings using city-wide fiber optics could provide a way for quantifying the impact of COVID-19 measures on human activity in different blocks.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has been impacting all aspects of our society, public health and the economy
Quantifying the response of human activity to different COVID-19 measures may serve as a potential way to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures and optimize them in the future (Gupta et al, 2020; Jarvis et al, 2020)
Our results provide the evidence that seismic noises sources from the main campus tend to be less irregular (Figs. 4 and 5), similar to the mobility data, and can serve to assess the dynamic behavior of human activity
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has been impacting all aspects of our society, public health and the economy. Lindsey et al (2020) used DAS with telecommunication fiber to detect a seismic noise reduction due to a decrease in vehicles immediately following the lockdown order in California between 1 March and 1 May 2020, and found a correlation between the urban noise level from DAS measurements and mobile phone locations.
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