Raw Seismic Data for Traffic Interferometry Experiment from Ithaca, NY, USA

This file contains the raw seismic data needed to reproduce the results of the accompanying manuscript "Retrieval of body waves with seismic interferometry of vehicle traffic: A case study from upstate New York, USA"

Seismic interferometry of vehicle traffic recorded by a vertical component seismograph array along a highway in upstate New York has recovered surface and body waves with velocities in agreement with waves propagating through the Devonian and Silurian shales of New York state. The faster arrivals extracted via interferometry have velocities that agree with P-waves observed by a controlled-source refraction survey and with local velocities derived from local seismicity in the study region. While the slower linear arrivals retrieved with interferometry agree with Rayleigh waves observed in the refraction survey. Although vehicle traffic was observed during every hour of data, there is a clear contrast in traffic volume between peak hours and non-peak hours, where the volume considerably diminishes, as expected. Interestingly, amplitude variation across the dataset is not substantial, resulting in little need for amplitude normalization to successfully extract body waves, nonetheless better results are obtained when cross-coherence is used in conjunction with small time windows to reduce crosstalk among the vehicle sources, given their transient nature. In comparison to other seismic sources such as trains, vehicle traffic also has a broadband signature, although more compact in time as shown by spectrograms. The results presented here suggest that vehicle traffic can function as an effective seismic source for body wave interferometry under the right conditions and survey geometries.