To look into site characteristics of the Hwacheon borehole seismic station, we analyzed property of earthquake and microtremor recorded on surface and borehole seismometers. Acoording to analysis result of microtremor, the surfaceto-borehole energy ratio was approximately 15 times greater during the daytime than during the nighttime, and the surfaceto-borehole ratios of spectral amplitudes as frequency increases. For earthquake data, amplitude spectra and dominant frequency were computed using surface and borehole data. As a result, small earthquakes with short distance recorded on surface seismometer peaked at 8 Hz, 46 Hz. This result corresponds to resonance frequencies (7.4 Hz, 46 Hz) calculated by H/V spectral ratio. We confirmed amplification effect by site characteristics of overburden. Background noise level was approximately 20,000 times smaller at borehole seismic station than surface seismic station. These results provide strong evidence for the superior recording of earthquakes using borehole seismometers instead of surface seismometers.

To investigate spatial and temporal variations of low-frequency (≤ 5 Hz) ambient seismic noise, we analyzed the noise data recorded for one whole year of 2014 at surface accelerometer stations in South Korea. After decomposed into low-frequency (LF; < 1 Hz) and high-frequency (HF; ≥ 1 Hz) components, the root-mean-squared (RMS) amplitudes and power spectral densities (PSD) of the noise data were computed. The RMS amplitudes were larger on islands and near-shore stations, but also large RMS amplitudes were observed at inland stations in large cities only for HF components. The RMS amplitudes of HF components were larger in the daytime than at nighttime and during weekdays than on Sunday and holidays. This indicates the HF components are closely related to human activities. On the contrary, daily and weekly variations were not clear in the LF components while they showed seasonal variations with its maximum during the winter and a good correlation with significant wave height. Therefore, we interpret the mechanism of LF components is closely related to natural phenomena such as sea. The amplitude of LF components decreased as an exponential function of the distance to the center of typhoons. The exponential index of -0.76 suggested that ambient seismic noise included both surface and body waves. Peak frequencies of the PSD curves were near 0.34 Hz indicating the double frequency. No temporal variation in the peak frequency was clearly noticed.