Seismic noises by infrastructure fiber optics reveal the impact of
COVID-19 measures on human activities
Abstract
Recent world-wide quieting of seismic noise caused by COVID-19 lockdown
measures has been observed by seismometers. However, current seismic
network that has a few seismometers or none in a city-scale area is hard
to reveal the spatiotemporal characteristic of seismic noise impacted by
COVID-19 measures. Here, we show that a 5-km-long distributed acoustic
sensing (DAS) array deployed in State College, PA is able to illuminate
seismic noise variation in a broad bandwidth 0.01 - 100 Hz during March
- June 2020. The temporal noise variation exhibits a ‘decrease-increase’
trend responding to ‘decrease-increase’ human activities caused by the
COVID-19 measures - from stay-at-home to Phase Green. Our results reveal
different types of human activities (including footsteps, road traffics,
and machines) as noise sources, suggesting that DAS noise recordings
using cite widely-installed infrastructure fiber optics could be used
for quantifying the impact of COVID-19 measures on human activities in
city block dimensions.