Abstract. During the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries worldwide put in place social interventions, consisting of restricting the mobility of citizens, aimed at slowing and mitigating the spread of the epidemic. In particular, Italy, as the first European country violently struck by the COVID-19 outbreak, applied a sequence of progressive restrictions to reduce both human mobility and human-to-human contacts from the end of February to mid-March 2020. Here, we analysed the seismic signatures of these lockdown measures in the densely populated Eastern Sicily, characterised by the presence of a permanent seismic network used for both seismic and volcanic monitoring. We specifically emphasize how the amount of the amplitude reduction of anthropogenic seismic noise (reaching ~50–60%), its temporal pattern and spectral content are strongly station-dependent. As for the latter, we exhibited that on average the frequencies above 10 Hz are the most influenced by the anthropogenic seismic noise. Finally, we found an impressive similarity between the temporal patterns of anthropogenic seismic noise and human mobility, as quantified by the mobile phone-derived data shared by Google, Facebook and Apple. These results further confirm how seismic data, routinely acquired worldwide for seismic and volcanic surveillance, can be used to monitor human mobility too.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19锁定措施的地震证据：西西里岛东部案例研究

摘要。在COVID-19大流行期间，世界上大多数国家都采取了社会干预措施，包括限制公民的流动性，目的是减缓和缓解该流行病的传播。尤其是，意大利是受COVID-19疫情猛烈袭击的第一个欧洲国家，从2020年2月底到3月中旬，实施了一系列渐进式限制措施，以减少人员流动和人与人之间的接触。我们分析了人口稠密的西西里东部这些锁定措施的地震特征，其特征是存在用于地震和火山监测的永久地震网络。我们特别强调人为地震噪声的幅度减小量（达到〜50–60％），其时间模式和频谱含量如何与站强相关。至于后者，我们展示出平均而言，高于10 Hz的频率受人为地震噪声的影响最大。最终，我们发现人为地震噪声的时间模式与人类移动性之间存在令人印象深刻的相似性，这是通过Google，Facebook和Apple共享的手机数据进行量化的。这些结果进一步证实了世界范围内常规用于地震和火山监测的地震数据也可以用于监测人类活动。