A method for relocating seismic events using surface waves

1973 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1305-1313
Author(s):  
S. T. Crough ◽  
R. Van der Voo

abstract Seismic events can be relocated relative to a reference event by using the group-velocity dispersion curves of surface waves. Since group velocity is a function of the travel path, surface waves from two events in the same locale should show identical group velocities when viewed at any one seismograph station. A computer technique has been developed for comparing the group-velocity curves of any event with the curves of a reference event and for determining the relocation which causes the curves to best coincide. The method is evaluated by relocating eight intermediate-size nuclear explosions of the Nevada Test Site series. With precise curve fitting, the surface-wave locations are slightly more accurate in southern Nevada than the standard body-wave determinations. The surface-wave origin times are considerably more accurate. In areas of sparse station coverage or of many small earthquakes, the surface-wave method can be expected to improve seismic locations significantly.

Geophysics ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Capon ◽  
R. J. Greenfield ◽  
R. T. Lacoss

The results of a series of off‐line signal processing experiments are presented for long‐period data obtained from the Large Aperture Seismic Array (LASA) located in eastern Montana. The signal‐to‐noise ratio gains obtained with maximum‐likelihood processing, as well as other simpler forms of processing, are presented for body‐wave as well as surface‐wave phases. A discussion of the frequency‐wavenumber characteristics of the noise which led to these results is also given. On the basis of these experiments, several recommendations are made concerning optimum long‐period array configurations and on‐line or off‐line processing methods. The usefulness of maximum‐likelihood processing in suppressing an interfering teleseism is demonstrated. An experiment is given in which maximum‐likelihood processing achieved about 20 db suppression of an interfering teleseism, while simpler forms of processing such as beam‐forming obtained about 11 db. The matched filtering of surface waves using chirp waveforms is shown to be highly effective. A useful discriminant for distinguishing between natural seismic events and underground nuclear explosions, using both the long‐period and short‐period data, was found to be the relationship between the surface‐wave and body‐wave magnitudes. Measurements of this discriminant made on events from four tectonic regions of the earth are presented. It is shown that 60 and 100 percent detectability of surface waves for natural seismic events from the Central Asian‐Kurile Islands‐Kamchatka region occurs at about LASA body‐wave magnitudes 4.5 and 4.9, respectively.


1999 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.-T. Wu ◽  
Y.-Y. Chen

This paper presents the results on the utilization of a wavelet transform to study the dispersion of laser-generated surface waves in an epoxy-bonded copper-aluminum layered specimen with and without unbond areas. Laser ultrasonic experiments based on the point-source/point-receiver (PS/PR) technique were undertaken to measure surface wave signals in a layered specimen. The wavelet transform with a Morlet wavelet function was adopted to analyze the group velocity dispersion of the surface wave signals. A novel hybrid formula for group velocity dispersion is proposed for measurements across unbond regions. Results and data obtained are in good agreement with calculated and experimental dispersion curves. The general behavior of the group velocity dispersion for different measurement, configurations can be utilized to differentiate the unbond regions in a layered structure.


1969 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1455-1458 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. W. Basham

A suite of 33 Asian earthquakes and 36 Central Asia and Novaya Zemlya underground explosions are used to define the minimum detection levels in terms of surface-wave and body-wave magnitudes and the discrimination thresholds of the M versus m discriminant for the Canadian seismograph network. Under low microseismic noise conditions surface-waves can be observed for earthquakes down to m 4.9 and explosions down to m 5.9 for the region near the central Asia test sites. For events above these magnitudes, the M versus m relationships provide reliable discrimination between earthquakes and explosions. Comparison with an intracontinental study leads to the conclusion that the discrimination threshold is limited by path effects and greater distances to events about m 1.0 larger near the Asian test sites than near the Nevada test site.


1971 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 899-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. B. Freund

Three-dimensional wave propagation in an elastic half space is considered. The half space is traction free on half its boundary, while the remaining part of the boundary is free of shear traction and is constrained against normal displacement by a smooth, rigid barrier. A time-harmonic surface wave, traveling on the traction free part of the surface, is obliquely incident on the edge of the barrier. The amplitude and the phase of the resulting reflected surface wave are determined by means of Laplace transform methods and the Wiener-Hopf technique. Wave propagation in an elastic half space in contact with two rigid, smooth barriers is then considered. The barriers are arranged so that a strip on the surface of uniform width is traction free, which forms a wave guide for surface waves. Results of the surface wave reflection problem are then used to geometrically construct dispersion relations for the propagation of unattenuated guided surface waves in the guiding structure. The rate of decay of body wave disturbances, localized near the edges of the guide, is discussed.


Geophysics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 677-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helle A. Pedersen ◽  
Jérôme I. Mars ◽  
Pierre‐Olivier Amblard

Surface waves are increasingly used for shallow seismic surveys—in particular, in acoustic logging, environmental, and engineering applications. These waves are dispersive, and their dispersion curves are used to obtain shear velocity profiles with depth. The main obstacle to their more widespread use is the complexity of the associated data processing and interpretation of the results. Our objective is to show that energy reassignment in the time–frequency domain helps improve the precision of group velocity measurements of surface waves. To show this, full‐waveform seismograms with added white noise for a shallow flat‐layered earth model are analyzed by classic and reassigned multiple filter analysis (MFA). Classic MFA gives the expected smeared image of the group velocity dispersion curve, while the reassigned curve gives a very well‐constrained, narrow dispersion curve. Systematic errors from spectral fall‐off are largely corrected by the reassignment procedure. The subsequent inversion of the dispersion curve to obtain the shear‐wave velocity with depth is carried out through a procedure combining linearized inversion with a nonlinear Monte Carlo inversion. The diminished uncertainty obtained after reassignment introduces significantly better constraints on the earth model than by inverting the output of classic MFA. The reassignment is finally carried out on data from a shallow seismic survey in northern Belgium, with the aim of determining the shear‐wave velocities for seismic risk assessment. The reassignment is very stable in this case as well. The use of reassignment can make dispersion measurements highly automated, thereby facilitating the use of surface waves for shallow surveys.


Geophysics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 76 (6) ◽  
pp. V115-V128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Wu ◽  
Yue Li ◽  
Baojun Yang

To remove surface waves from seismic records while preserving other seismic events of interest, we introduced a transform and a filter based on recent developments in image processing. The transform can be seen as a weighted Radon transform, in particular along linear trajectories. The weights in the transform are data dependent and designed to introduce large amplitude differences between surface waves and other events such that surface waves could be separated by a simple amplitude threshold. This is a key property of the filter and distinguishes this approach from others, such as conventional ones that use information on moveout ranges to apply a mask in the transform domain. Initial experiments with synthetic records and field data have demonstrated that, with the appropriate parameters, the proposed trace transform filter performs better both in terms of surface wave attenuation and reflected signal preservation than the conventional methods. Further experiments on larger data sets are needed to fully assess the method.


2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 2234-2246
Author(s):  
Hang Li ◽  
Jianqiao Xu ◽  
Xiaodong Chen ◽  
Heping Sun ◽  
Miaomiao Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Inversion of internal structure of the Earth using surface waves and free oscillations is a hot topic in seismological research nowadays. With the ambient noise data on seismically quiet days sourced from the gravity tidal observations of seven global distributed superconducting gravimeters (SGs) and the seismic observations for validation from three collocated STS-1 seismometers, long-period surface waves and background free oscillations are successfully extracted by the phase autocorrelation (PAC) method, respectively. Group-velocity dispersion curves at the frequency band of 2–7.5 mHz are extracted and compared with the theoretical values calculated with the preliminary reference Earth model. The comparison shows that the best observed values differ about ±2% from the corresponding theoretical results, and the extracted group velocities of the best SG are consistent with the result of the collocated STS-1 seismometer. The results indicate that reliable group-velocity dispersion curves can be measured with the ambient noise data from SGs. Furthermore, the fundamental frequency spherical free oscillations of 2–7 mHz are also clearly extracted using the same ambient noise data. The results in this study show that the SG, besides the seismometer, is proved to be another kind of instrument that can be used to observe long-period surface waves and free oscillations on seismically quiet days with a high degree of precision using the PAC method. It is worth mentioning that the PAC method is first and successfully introduced to analyze SG observations in our study.


Geophysics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. R1-R11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Borisov ◽  
Ryan Modrak ◽  
Fuchun Gao ◽  
Jeroen Tromp

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful method for estimating the earth’s material properties. We demonstrate that surface-wave-driven FWI is well-suited to recovering near-surface structures and effective at providing S-wave speed starting models for use in conventional body-wave FWI. Using a synthetic example based on the SEG Advanced Modeling phase II foothills model, we started with an envelope-based objective function to invert for shallow large-scale heterogeneities. Then we used a waveform-difference objective function to obtain a higher-resolution model. To accurately model surface waves in the presence of complex tomography, we used a spectral-element wave-propagation solver. Envelope misfit functions are found to be effective at minimizing cycle-skipping issues in surface-wave inversions, and surface waves themselves are found to be useful for constraining complex near-surface features.


1971 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Boucher ◽  
Stephen D. Malone ◽  
E. Fred Homuth

abstract The University of Nevada's three-component quartz-rod strain meter installation at Round Mountain, Nevada (38°42.1′N, 117°04.6′W) has recorded a number of underground nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site, beginning with the megaton-sized JORUM event September 16 1969. Both that explosion and the larger HANDLEY event on March 26 1970 produced static strain offsets of a few parts in 109 at Round Mountain. These offsets did not decay within the first few hours after the explosions. In both cases, the strain offsets were in the sense of ground extension radial to the shot point, which is inconsistent with the assumption of a pure compressive source of strain. The strain-change ellipse for the HANDLEY event was found to have a major strain axis of 11 × 10−9 extensional, oriented N 34°W, and a minor axis of 7.4 × 10−9 compressional. A single-component strain meter at Mina, Nevada, (38°26.3′N, 118°9.3′W) was operated for the HANDLEY event, and recorded a strain offset of 2.6 × 10−9 in the direction N 74°E. Strain offsets at the time of the largest collapse events following HANDLEY were observed at Round Mountain. These offsets had the same sense on each component as those following the explosion itself. This is interpreted as support for the hypothesis that the strain changes are tectonic in origin, and the explosion initiates the strain release. Small offsets were observed for three smaller explosions out of a total of 13 studied. The relationship between body-wave magnitude mb and maximum dynamic strains at Round Mountain may be described empirically by the equation Log S = − 13.4 + 1.10 mb. Because of its high sensitivity and stability, the Round Mountain strain meter is capable of obtaining useful measurements of dynamic and static strain effects of intermediate- to large-sized explosions, at distances ranging from 160 to 200 km.


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