Seismic noise variability as an indicator of urban mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Santiago metropolitan region, Chile
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2021Metadata
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Ojeda, Javier
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Seismic noise variability as an indicator of urban mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Santiago metropolitan region, Chile
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Abstract
On 3 March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was
confirmed in Chile. Since then, the Ministry of Health has
imposed mobility restrictions, a global policy implemented
to mitigate the propagation of the virus. The national seismic
network operating throughout Chile provides an opportunity
to monitor the ambient seismic noise (ASN) and determine
the effectiveness of public policies imposed to reduce
urban mobility in the major cities. Herein, we analyse temporal
variations in high-frequency ASN recorded by broadband
and strong-motion instruments deployed throughout the
main cities of Chile.We focus on the capital, Santiago, a city
with more than 7 million inhabitants because it is seismically
well instrumented and has high levels of urban mobility
due to worker commutes inside the region. We observed
strong similarities between anthropogenic seismic noise and
human mobility indicators, as shown in the difference between
urban and rural amplitudes, long-term variations, and
variability due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The same results
are observed in other cities such as Iquique, La Serena, and
Concepción. Our findings suggest that the initially implemented
public health policies and the early end to confinement
in mid-April 2020 in the metropolitan region caused an
increase in mobility and virus transmission, where the peak
in anthropogenic seismic noise coincides with the peak of
the effective reproductive number from confirmed positive
cases of COVID-19. These results confirm that seismic networks
are capable of recording the urban mobility of population
within cities, and we show that continuous monitoring
of ASN can quantify urban mobility. Finally, we suggest that
real-time changes in ASN amplitudes should be considered
part of public health policy in further protocols in Santiago
and other high-density cities of the world, as has been useful
during the recent pandemic.
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Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo 1200779
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Solid Earth, 12, 1075–1085, 2021
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