Estimating the low-frequency seismic response of submarine fiber optics with a teleseismic recording

Abstract

Recently, with rapid developments in distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) techniques, optical fibers are widely used as seismometers to carry out dense and broadband seismic observation. However, the frequency responses, especially the low-frequency responses of submarine cables, which are of key importance in focal mechanism and deep seismic imaging, are still poorly understood. In this study, we comprehensively evaluated the phase and amplitude responses of the submarine DAS array by comparing teleseismic records from the DAS array and traditional broadband seismometers. Our 21 km long DAS array is located around 1 500 km from the epicentre, and two fixed seismometers from the Shandong Provincial Seismic Network are positioned at either end of the array. Our results show that for phase response, the data from DAS and seismometers are of great similarity, with a cross-correlation coefficient reaching 80 %. For amplitudes, the velocity value recorded by CHD (Shandong Provincial Seismic Network Changdao Seismic Station) seismometers is about 1.6 times the value obtained by DAS. In terms of surface wave dispersion, the differences between the different data sets are generally less than 3 %. Our results verify the sensitivity of submarine optical fibers to low-frequency seismic signals and the feasibility of deep structure imaging using submarine DAS arrays.

Keywords

Hualien earthquake / Submarine optical fiber cable / Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) / Seismometer

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Haoran Song: Writing – original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Jian Sun: Resources, Data curation. Jialun Gong: Resources, Data curation. Boxing Zhu: Methodology, Data curation. Baoshan Wang: Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Lubing Zheng: Resources, Data curation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare the following financial interests (e.g., any funding for the research project)/personal relationships (e.g., the author is an employee of a profitable company) which may be considered as potential competing interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Baoshan Wang is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Earthquake Research Advances and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish the article.

Author agreement and acknowledgement

All the authors who contributed to the study have approved the final version and this study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42430103), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (Grant No. YSBR-020). This is the first submission to this journal, and we do not plan to submit to other Journals. And we'd like to permit the publisher to reproduce this paper in all media.

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