Time-Series Modeling of Tide Gauge Records for Monitoring of the Crustal Activities Related to Oceanic Trench Earthquakes Around Japan

Abstract

Tide gauge observations along the coastline of Japan have recorded the land sinking due to the continuous subduction of the oceanic plates, indicating that stress and strain energies have been accumulating at the plate boundary, which would eventually cause large oceanic trench earthquakes like the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. The proposed method extracts such long-term activities of the Earth's crust together with rapid displacements related to earthquakes, even before the establishment of the global positioning system, from monthly mean data of the sea levels. A state space model decomposes the tide gauge time series into trend, seasonal, autoregressive and observation noise components, each of which are estimated using the particle filter algorithm. The spatial and temporal distributions of the extracted trend component clearly indicate high-risk regions, near which giant earthquakes have occurred or are predicted to occur. A multivariate analysis of the observatories located at the northeast coast of Japan successfully determines the past crustal displacement in the case of the 1978 Off-Miyagi Earthquake. The proposed method has the potential application for monitoring crustal activities related to the accumulation of earthquake energy.