Abstract
We monitored the time history of the velocity change (dv/v) from 2002 to
2022 to investigate temporal changes in the physical state near the
Parkfield Region of the San Andreas Fault throughout the interseismic
period. Following the coseismic decrease in dv/v caused due to the 2003
San Simeon and the 2004 Parkfield earthquakes, the dv/v heals
logarithmically and shows a net long-term increase in which the current
dv/v level is equivalent to, or exceeding, the value before the 2003 San
Simeon earthquake. We investigated this long-term trend by fitting the
model accounting for the environmental and coseismic effects to the
channel-weighted dv/v time series. We confirmed with the metrics of AIC
and BIC that the additional term of either a linear trend term, or a
residual healing term for the case where the healing had not been
completed before the San Simeon earthquake occurred, robustly improved
the fit to the data. We eventually evaluated the sensitivity of the dv/v
time history to the GNSS-derived strain field around the fault. The
cumulative dilatational strain spatially averaged around the seismic
stations shows a slight extension, which is opposite to what would be
expected for an increase in dv/v. However, the cumulative rotated axial
strain shows compression in a range near the maximum contractional
horizontal strain (azimuth of N35°W to N45°E), suggesting that the
closing of pre-existing microcracks aligned perpendicular to the axial
contractional strains would be a candidate to cause the long-term
increase observed in the multiple station pairs.