Comparison of four techniques for estimating temporal change of seismic velocity with passive image interferometry

Passive image interferometry (PII) is becoming a powerful tool for detecting the temporal variations in the Earth’s structure, which applies coda wave interferometry to the waveforms from the cross-correlation of seismic ambient noise. There are four techniques for estimating temporal change of seismic velocity with PII: moving-window cross-correlation technique (MWCCT), moving-window cross-spectrum technique (MWCST), stretching technique (ST) and moving-window stretching technique (MWST). In this paper, we use the continuous seismic records from a typical station pair near the Wenchuan M S 8.0 earthquake fault zone and generate three sets of waveforms by stacking cross-correlation function of ambient noise with different numbers of days, and then apply four techniques to processing the three sets of waveforms and compare their results. Our results indicate that the techniques based on moving-window (MWCCT, MWCST and MWST) are superior in detecting the change of seismic velocity, and the MWCST can give a better estimate of velocity change than the other moving-window techniques due to measurement error. We also investigate the clock errors and their influences on measuring velocity change. We find that when the clock errors are not very large, they have limited impact on the estimate of the velocity change with the moving-window techniques.