The influences of large earthquake signals on the recovery of surface waves from ambient noise cross-correlation functions*

Abstract

Ambient noise tomography (ANT) has been widely used to image crust and upmost mantle structures. ANT assumes that sources of ambient noise are diffuse and evenly distributed in space and the energy of different modes is equipartitioned. At present, the sources of the primary and the secondary microseisms are well studied, but there are only a few on the studies of long-period ambient noise sources. In this study, we study the effects of large earthquake signals on the recovery of surface waves from seismic ambient noise data recorded by seismic stations from the US permanent networks and Global Seismographic Network (GSN). Our results show that large earthquake signals play an important role on the recovery of long-period surface waves from ambient noise cross-correlation functions. Our results are consistent with previous studies that suggest the contribution of earthquake signals to the recovery of surface waves from cross-correlations of ambient noise is dominant at periods larger than 20–40 s.