Analysis of predictive properties of ground tremor using Huang decomposition

A method is proposed for analyzing the tremor of the earth’s surface, measured by means of space geodesy, in order to highlight the prognostic effects of seismicity activation. The method is illustrated by the example of a joint analysis of a set of synchronous time series of daily vertical displacements of the earth’s surface on the Japanese Islands for the time interval 2009–2023. The analysis is based on dividing the source data (1047 time series) into blocks (clusters of stations) and sequentially applying the principal component method. The station network is divided into clusters using the K-means method from the maximum pseudo-F-statistics criterion, and for Japan the optimal number of clusters was chosen to be 15. The Huang decomposition method into a sequence of independent empirical oscillation modes (EMD — Empirical Mode Decomposition) is applied to the time series of principal components from station blocks. To provide the stability of estimates of the waveforms of the EMD decomposition, averaging of 1000 independent additive realizations of white noise of limited amplitude was performed. Using the Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix of the waveforms of the first three EMD components in a sliding time window, indicators of abnormal tremor behavior were determined. By calculating the correlation function between the average indicators of anomalous behavior and the released seismic energy in the vicinity of the Japanese Islands, it was established that bursts in the measure of anomalous tremor behavior precede emissions of seismic energy. The purpose of the article is to clarify common hypotheses that movements of the earth’s crust recorded by space geodesy may contain predictive information. That displacements recorded by geodetic methods respond to the effects of earthquakes is widely known and has been demonstrated many times. But isolating geodetic effects that predict seismic events is much more challenging. In our paper, we propose one method for detecting predictive effects in space geodesy data.