Effects of stochastic and natural seismic noise on the performance of waveform cross-correlation used to recover low-magnitude seismicity prior to the July 29, 2025, Kamchatka earthquake

Ivan Kitov

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arXiv · 2607.16226

Effects of stochastic and natural seismic noise on the performance of waveform cross-correlation used to recover low-magnitude seismicity prior to the July 29, 2025, Kamchatka earthquake

Ivan Kitov

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Abstract

Waveform cross-correlation (WCC) applied to data from seismic arrays allows for the reduction of the detection threshold by approximately an order of magnitude. When applied to the data of the IMS, the smallest WCC detected events were by at least one magnitude unit lower than those reported by the IDC and revealed that the pattern of low-magnitude activity prior to the July 29, 2025, earthquake was similar to that prior to the May 24, 2013, Sea of Okhotsk earthquake. The consistent increase in the number of events with magnitudes approaching the corner value of the Kamchatka recurrence curve can likely be used as a precursory indicator of a mega-earthquake preparation. The WCC-based events are characterized by detections with a signal-to-noise ratio below the IDC detection threshold and are often not visible to analysts. This makes the statistical significance of the WCC event hypotheses uncertain due to the absence of a random noise reference and the potential side-sensitivity of the IMS arrays. Both problems are addressed. Random noise is used to calculate a WCC bulletin. This exercise shows a negligibly low number of WCC events and confirms the statistical significance of the WCC-based events. The side-sensitivity is modelled using the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake. When master events (MEs) within the Kamchatka region are used in the WCC processing, a large number of false events are generated. When MEs from the Tohoku zone are added, all false events disappear since the Tohoku MEs win the conflict resolution process. When the random noise is scaled to a small fraction of the maximum amplitude within the processed interval, the WCC detection is enhanced with more detections and WCC-based events created. This is an effect similar to noise whitening, which makes the matched filter detector more sensitive and closer to its optimal performance under stochastic noise conditions.

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BibTeX RIS

Ivan Kitov. 2026-06-20. Effects of stochastic and natural seismic noise on the performance of waveform cross-correlation used to recover low-magnitude seismicity prior to the July 29, 2025, Kamchatka earthquake. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16226

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