Ambient seismic noise consists of continuous vibrations randomly excited in time and space, mostly at the Earth's surface, by natural and anthropogenic dynamic phenomena. Noise has long been considered a contaminant of seismic impulse responses from earthquakes or man-made explosions. The deterministic nature of the wave equation, together with the temporal and spatial coherence of seismic waves and the development of massive computing infrastructures, have enabled our ability to turn “noise into signal” and to obtain deterministic images of the Earth's subsurface and its mechanical evolution from these random-like noise records.
Starke et al. (Mon,) studied this question.