Abstract
Slow-slip events were discovered in many subduction zones during the
last two decades thanks to recordings of the displacement of Earth’s
surface by dense GPS networks. They can last from a few days to several
years, and have a relatively short recurrence time (months to years),
compared to the recurrence time of regular earthquakes (up to several
hundreds of years), allowing scientists to observe and study many
complete event cycles. Moreover, whereas regular earthquakes occur along
the shallow part of the dipping plate boundary (in the seismogenic /
locked zone), slow-slip events often occur on the plate boundary downdip
of the locked zone. Slow-slip events could potentially trigger large
earthquakes. This phenomenon provides a potential opportunity to further
our understanding of subduction zone processes, and evaluate the
time-varying seismic hazard. Wavelets methods such as the Discrete
Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet
Transform (MODWT) are mathematical tools for analyzing time series
simultaneously in the time and the frequency domain by observing how
weighted averages of a time series vary from one averaging period to the
next. In this study, we use wavelet methods to analyze GPS recordings of
slow-slip events in New Zealand. An important application of the DWT and
the MODWT is the estimation of a signal hidden by noise within an
observed time series. We used synthetic time series with slow slip
events of different durations, to which a Gaussian noise has been added,
and denoised the signal using a wavelet-based method, and a low-pass
filter. Although the signal was barely visible behind the noise, we
could see a unique ramp-like signal in the data denoised with the
wavelet-based method, whereas the low-pass filtered signal showed
several ramp-like features which were not present in the original
synthetic data. Eventually, we aim to be able to detect possible smaller
(magnitude 5) slow-slip events that may be currently undetected with
standard methods, detect longer (months to years) slow-slip events that
are more difficult to detect than slow-slip events with a short duration
(days to weeks), and determine the vertical displacement of the ground
surface during a slow-slip event.