Summary
The seismic response of the Santiago City, the capital of Chile with more than 5.5 million inhabitants, is controlled by the properties of the shallower quaternary deposits and the impedance contrast with the underlying Abanico formation, among other factors. In this study, we process continuous records of ambient seismic noise to perform an ambient seismic noise tomography with the aim of defining the shallower structure of the Abanico formation underneath the densely populated metropolitan area of Santiago, Chile. The seismic signals were recorded by a network consisting of 29 broadband seismological stations and 12 accelerograph stations, located in a 35 × 35 km2 quadrant. We used the average coherency of the vertical components to calculate dispersion curves from 0.1 to 5 Hz and Bootstrap resampling to estimate the variance of the travel times. The reliable frequency band of the dispersion curves was defined by an empirical method based on sign normalization of the coherency real part. The ambient noise tomography was solved on a domain discretized into 256 2 × 2 km2 cells. Using a regularized weighted least squares inversion, we inverted the observed travel-times between stations, assuming straight ray paths, in order to obtain 2D phase velocity maps from 0.2 Hz to 1.1 Hz, linearly spaced every 0.05 Hz, in 157 of the 256 square cells of the domain. In each square cell with information, dispersion curves were assembled and used to invert shear wave velocity profiles, which were interpolated using the ordinary Kriging method to obtain a 3D shear wave velocity model valid from 0.6 to 5 km depth. The 3D velocity model shows that the Abanico formation is stiffer in the south of the study area with larger velocity anomalies towards the shallower part of the model. The value of the shear wave velocity narrows with depth, reaching an average value of 3.5 km/s from 3 to 5 km depth.
P- and S-wave velocity model estimation from surface wave data