Surface and body waves from hurricane Katrina observed in California

Hurricane Katrina struck land on 29 August 2005 as one of the strongest storms in the United States. The recent availability of continuous seismic data from a large number of stations enables us to characterize features of hurricane-generated noise in detail. By beamforming noise recorded on a distr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2006-05, Vol.119 (5_Supplement), p.3253-3253
Main Authors: Gerstoft, Peter, Fehler, Michael C, Sabra, Karim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Marine
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Summary:Hurricane Katrina struck land on 29 August 2005 as one of the strongest storms in the United States. The recent availability of continuous seismic data from a large number of stations enables us to characterize features of hurricane-generated noise in detail. By beamforming noise recorded on a distributed seismic array in southern California, we observe and track both the surface and body P-waves generated by Katrina in the 4–20-s period (0.05–0.25 Hz) microseism band. As the hurricane made landfall, the longer-period surface waves weakened, indicating that air/ocean/land coupling was a major factor in their generation. We observed P-waves that have propagated deep (1100 km) inside the Earth. These P-waves can be back-propagated to the hurricane. These findings demonstrate that ocean microseisms can propagate quite far and open the possibility of further use of seismic noise, even at very low signal level.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4786069