Hiroshi Aoyama

Volcanic tremors and earthquakes must be monitored to gain insights into volcanic activity. Localization of their sources is often challenging because of the unclear onset of seismic waves, particularly when the volcanic activity increases before and during an eruption. Existing alternative techniques to locate the seismic sources are based on the information on the spatial amplitude distribution or the travel-time difference of seismic waves. Exploring the idea of combining both information for source location determination, we propose a new location method that uses the amplitude and travel-time difference information obtained from the unnormalized cross correlations of seismic data. Evaluation using volcanic earthquakes that occurred in 2020 at Tokachidake volcano, Japan, reveals an improvement in location accuracy compared to existing methods using individual information. Analysis of an episode of volcanic tremors and earthquakes accompanying a rapid tilt change event on 14 September 2020 reveals that during the inflation of the crater area, reliable seismic source locations with an error of ≤1 km become more concentrated at around 0.6 km beneath the 62-2 crater, in which the most recent eruptive activity had occurred. Such changes in source locations are associated with the movement of volcanic gas and hot water from the hydrothermal system below. Our proposed method is useful for locating and monitoring seismic source locations corresponding to volcanic fluid movements.