Environmental Seismology, Ambient Noise, & Ground Motion

How can seismology tell us about environmental processes? Seismometers measure vibrations occurring at Earth's surface due to people, cars, earthquakes, ocean waves, and a range of other environmental phoenomena. Therefore, seismology can be used as an effective tool for understanding interactions between the solid Earth, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Many of the tools we develop for imaging the Earth's deep interior using seismic noise can be shifted to higher frequency and repurposed for studying near-surface and environmental problems. We work on problems such as the effect of lake ice on seismic noise and using seismic observations to estimate ice cover.

Seismic ambient noise has revolutionized seismology in recent decades by providing short period (high frequency) information about structure of the crust and shallow lithosphere. We are working on refining existing ambient noise imaging techniques, improving data quality through corrections, and extending it for new purposes. One application of ambient noise that has severely lagged is seismic attenuation. Due to the pre-conditioning that many studies apply to the raw data, amplitudes are often not reliable. We are actively working on new methods of extracting robust attenuation parameters from the crust using ambient noise.