Generalized Nonvolcanic Tremor Signal for Characterizing the Seismic
Process of Great East Japan Earthquake
Abstract
The generalized nonvolcanic tremor has been proposed for characterizing
the seismic process of megathrust earthquakes. A tremor signal with a
vibrational velocity of microns per second exhibit the dominant
frequency of 1 Hz to 10 Hz in the Fourier amplitude spectrum. Paying
attention to the negative curvature of the spectrum, we generalize the
tremor and define alpha-tremor as the degree of the negative curvature
of the spectrum in the frequency range of 2.97 Hz to 9.80 Hz.
Significant tremors and background vibrations are respectively
represented by large positive alpha-tremors and non-positive
alpha-tremors. Alpha-tremor is evaluated for ground vibration data
acquired every 0.05 seconds for approximately 10 years at three seismic
stations. At the station 188 km away from the epicenter of the Great
East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) of magnitude 9, symmetries regarding the
seismic process of the GEJE have been found. Among the observed 9
prominent peaks of the positive alpha-tremor, the first and last peak
appears 3 years before and after GEJE, respectively. The frequency
distributions of the alpha-tremor during 3 years before and after GEJE
match by 99.95%. The statistical distribution that properly
approximates the frequency distribution of the positive alpha-tremor is
found to be the Gumbel distribution, rather than the Gaussian
distribution. The time evolution of the frequency distribution of the
alpha-tremor at the seismic station 1170 km away from the GEJE epicenter
suggests that GEJE may have affected the ground motion there, and
initiated the seismic process of the M7.3 earthquake that occurred near
the station.