Transient anomaly in fault-zone trapped waves during the preparatory phase of the 6 April 2009, Mw 6.3 L’Aquila earthquake

Fault-zone trapped waves generated by repeating earthquakes of the 2009 L’Aquila seismic sequence show a sudden, up to 100% increase of spectral amplitudes seven days before the mainshock. The jump occurs ten to twenty hours after the ML 4.1, 30 March 2009 largest foreshock. The amplitude increase is accompanied by a loss of waveform coherence in the fault-trapped wavetrain. Other geophysical and seismological parameters are known to have shown a sudden change after the 30 March foreshock. The concomitance of a consistent change in the fault-zone trapped waves leads us to interpret our observation as due to a sudden temporal variation of the velocity contrast between the fault damage zone and hosting rocks in the focal volume. Fault-zone trapped waves thus provide a refined time resolution for changes occurring near the rupture nucleation, with the indication of a strong variation in one day.