A preliminary seismic study of Taal Volcano, Luzon Island Philippines

The very active Taal Volcano lies in the southern part of Luzon Island only 60. km from Manila, the capital of the Philippines. In March 2008 we deployed a temporary seismic network around Taal that consisted of 8 three-component short period seismometers. This network recorded during the period from March to November 2008 about 1050 local events. In the early data processing stages, unexpected linear drifting of clock time was clearly identified for a number of stations. The drifting rates of each problematic station were determined and the errors were corrected before further processing. Initial location of each event was derived by manually picked P-/S-phases arrival times using HYPO71 and a general velocity model based on AK135. Since the velocity structure beneath Taal is essentially unknown, we used travel times of 338 well-located events in order to derive a minimum 1D velocity model using VELEST. The resulting locations show that most events occurred at the shallow depth beneath the Taal Volcano, and two major earthquake groups were noticed, with one lying underneath the western shore of Taal lake and the other one spread around the eastern flank of the Taal Volcano. Since there is no reported volcano activities during the operation period of our seismic array, we are still not confident to interpret these findings in terms of other natures of volcano at the current stage. However, our work represents an important pioneer step towards other more advanced seismic studies in Taal Volcano.