Correlation between seismic noise variation and COVID-19 pandemic measures using recordings from Penn State FORESEE array

Quantifying the response of human activities to different COVID-19 measures may serve as a potential way to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures and optimize measures. Recent studies reported that seismic noise reduction caused by less human activities due to COVID-19 lockdown had been observed by seismometers. However, it is difficult for current seismic infrastructure in urban cities to characterize spatiotemporal seismic noise during the postCOVID-19 lockdown because of sparse distribution. Here we show key connections between progressive COVID-19 measures and spatiotemporal seismic noise changes recorded by a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array deployed in State College, PA. Our results shows that DAS recordings using city-wide fiber optics could provide a way for quantifying the impact of COVID-19 measures on human activities in city blocks.