Rayleigh Waves Excited by Hurricanes on the Southeastern Coast of the
United States
Abstract
By cross-correlating ambient seismic noise, researchers have made
significant progress in retrieving Empirical Green’s Functions (EGFs) in
the past two decades. EGFs emerging with high Signal-to-Noise Ratios
(SNRs), however, requires stacking plenty of cross-correlations. Here,
we retrieve clear Rayleigh waves by cross-correlating noise released by
different hurricanes moving along the southeastern coast of the United
States. Extracted Rayleigh EGFs almost only emerge in the negative lag
time windows due to the dominated sources. We show significant
similarities of Rayleigh EGFs between the hurricane and one-year noise.
Stable dispersion curves obtained from hurricane noise with the F-J
transform agree well with that from one-year noise. Our results, indeed,
suggest that we can extract reliable dispersion curves from hurricane
noise in several days. Therefore, we enlarge the data sets for the
future work of illuminating the Earth’s crust and upper mantle.