Temporal stability of coda Q^-1 in southern California

Laura E. Sumiejski, & Peter M. Shearer

Published 2012, SCEC Contribution #1720

Some studies of coda Q^-1 have found temporal changes that may be associated with earthquake activity, but these analyses are subject to biases due to dif- ferences in source locations and other nonstationary behavior in earthquake catalogs. These biases can be greatly reduced by using clusters of repeating earthquakes; studies using this approach have generally found no resolvable changes in coda Q^-1. We examine coda Q^-1 variations across southern California using 22 similar event clusters identified from a recent large-scale waveform cross-correlation project to improve earthquake locations. These clusters are found across the region and span the time period between 1981 and 2005. We apply the method of Beroza et al. (1995) to compute differential coda Q^-1 using waveforms from similar earthquake pairs and analyze the results to constrain any possible temporal variations. Results from individual event pairs show a great deal of scatter in differential coda Q^-1, but exhibit no clear temporal variations or changes associated with large earthquakes. Application of a median filter to smooth the results shows that any persistent large-scale changes in coda Q^-1 during this time period are less than about 30%.

Citation
Sumiejski, L. E., & Shearer, P. M. (2012). Temporal stability of coda Q^-1 in southern California. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 102, 873-877. doi: 10.1785/0120110181.