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Clock drift corrections for large aperture ocean bottom seismometer arrays: application to the UPFLOW array in the mid-Atlantic Ocean

Cabieces, R; Harris, K; Ferreira, AMG; Tsekhmistrenko, M; Hicks, SP; Krüger, F; Geissler, WH; ... Schmidt-Aursch, MC; + view all (2024) Clock drift corrections for large aperture ocean bottom seismometer arrays: application to the UPFLOW array in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Geophysical Journal International , Article ggae354. 10.1093/gji/ggae354. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Accurate timing corrections for seismic data recorded by ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) are essential for a wide range of applications. The synchronisation of internal OBS clocks with Global Positioning System (GPS) is typically only possible prior to deployment on the seafloor and upon retrieval. Thus, untracked, clock errors in seismic data may accumulate over the deployment period. The measurement of the clock's offset from GPS at retrieval, referred to as ‘skew’, can be used to correct the data solely under the assumption of a uniform rate of clock drift throughout the whole deployment. However, clock errors can be nonlinear. We, therefore, develop a new workflow along with an associated open-source, interactive graphical user interface to estimate clock drift of large aperture OBS arrays. We use the workflow to estimate OBS clock drift curves for 40 OBSs of the large-scale UPFLOW seafloor array in the Madeira-Azores-Canaries region deployed for ∼14 months in 2021-22. We use the relative shift of daily Empirical Green's Functions obtained from seismic ambient noise recorded by all available data channels to track clock error. We find that 95% of our OBS clock drift observations have a substantial nonlinear component: most maximum deviations to linearity are ∼0.75 – 1 s (and up to 2 s) occurring mainly halfway through the deployment. We test our drift curves by using them to correct teleseismic earthquake recordings, which enables larger numbers of high-quality P-wave travel-time measurements than when using linear drift corrections. Our drift curves have on average an uncertainty of ∼0.11 s indicating the suitability of the corrected data for future seismological studies such as for seismic tomography, seismicity analysis and moment tensor inversions.

Type: Article
Title: Clock drift corrections for large aperture ocean bottom seismometer arrays: application to the UPFLOW array in the mid-Atlantic Ocean
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggae354
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggae354
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Atlantic Ocean, Seismic noise, Seismic instruments, Time series analysis, Surface waves and free oscillations, Wave propagation
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198232
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