Earthquake Detection Using a Nodal Array on the San Jacinto Fault in California: Evidence for High Foreshock Rates Preceding Many Events

We use a dense seismic array of 1,108 vertical-component geophones within a 600-m footprint to detect thousands of small earthquakes near an active strand of the San Jacinto fault zone in southern California during a 26-day period. We first correct site effects using multichannel cross-correlations of the P-waves of 256 cataloged earthquakes, and then perform beamforming analysis on the continuous waveforms in a slowness range from -0.4 to 0.4 s/km in both the east and north directions. At each time step, we identify the beam slowness with maximum amplitude and apply a picking algorithm to identify 13,408 events. These detections include over 55.6% of the events in the Quake Template Matching (QTM) catalog for all of southern California during the same time period and 70% of those within 100 km of the array. In addition, we detect over 10,000 new events, not in the QTM catalog. Many of these events can also be seen in records from nearby borehole seismic stations. Measured slownesses for the catalog and newly-discovered events group into clusters that can be associated with QTM earthquake locations, but with slowness values considerably distorted from predictions based on a 1-D velocity model, presumably owing to strong velocity heterogeneity near the San Jacinto Fault. Amplitudes of the detected events obey a Gutenberg-Richter distribution with a b-value close to one. Foreshocks are common among these detected events, increasing in rate before mainshocks following an inverse Omori's law.