Deciphering the Contributions of Volcanic and Environmental Events to Temporal Variations of the Regional Velocity Structure at the Kluchevskoy Volcano Group (Kamchatka, Russia)

Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in eastern Russia, is home to the Kluchevskoy volcano group, one of the largest and most active clusters of subduction zone volcanoes worldwide. Regular eruptions, volcanic and tectonic earthquakes, but also strong meteorological variations leave an imprint on the regional seismic velocity structure. We quantify the temporal velocity variations by applying the method of ambient seismic noise interferometry to waveform data recorded by the temporary KISS deployment and the permanent Kamchatka network. Due to its ubiquitous nature, ambient seismic noise allows for far denser temporal sampling than, e.g., active source or earthquake coda interferometry. However, source variability related, for example, to volcanic tremor activity affects the results retrieved by this method and can lead to decreased reliability. Here, we investigate the impact of the aforementioned environmental factors on the Green’s function of the medium using SeisMIC (Seismological Monitoring using Interferometric Concepts) – a new Python software to conduct noise interferometry surveys. In addition, we discuss the impact of the frequent volcanic tremors and other local seismic events on the stability of the computed Green’s function estimations (i.e., cross-correlations).