Temporal change in seismic wave attenuation using highly stable vibration sources

We developed a method to detect attenuation changes during seismic wave propagation excited by precisely controlled artificial seismic sources, namely Accurately Controlled Routinely Operated Signal System (ACROSS), and applied it to monitor the temporal changes for in situ data collected by previous studies. Our method, together with the use of the ACROSS sources, is less susceptible to noise level changes, from which conventional methods such as envelope calculation suffer. The method utilizes the noise level that is independently estimated in the frequency domain and eliminates the influence of the noise from the observed signal. For performance testing, we applied this method to a dataset that was obtained in an experiment at Awaji Island, Japan, from 2000 to 2001. We detected a change in amplitude caused by rainfall, variation in atmospheric temperature, and coseismic ground motions. Among them, coseismic changes are of particular interest because there are limited studies on coseismic attenuation change, in contrast to many studies on coseismic velocity decrease. At the 2000 Western Tottori earthquake (MW = 6.6, epicenter distance of 165 km), a sudden decrease in amplitude of up to 5% was observed. The coseismic amplitude reduction and its anisotropic characteristics, which showed a larger reduction in the direction of the major axis of velocity decrease, were consistent with the opening of fluid-filled cracks, as proposed by previous studies. The $$\Delta {Q}^{-1}$$ Δ Q - 1 corresponding to the amplitude change gives similar values to those reported in previous studies using natural earthquakes. Graphical Abstract

Cartesian Meshing Spherical Earth (CMSE): A Code Package to Incorporate the Spherical Earth in SPECFEM3D Cartesian Simulations

The SPECFEM3D_Cartesian code package is widely used in simulating seismic wave propagation on local and regional scales due to its computational efficiency compared with the one-chunk version of the SPECFEM3D_Globe code. In SPECFEM3D_Cartesian, the built-in meshing tool maps a spherically curved cube to a rectangular cube using the Universal Transverse Mercator projection (UTM). Meanwhile, the geodetic east, north, and up directions are assigned as the local x–y–z directions. This causes coordinate orientation issues in simulating waveform propagation in regions larger than 6° × 6° or near the Earth’s polar regions. In this study, we introduce a new code package, named Cartesian Meshing Spherical Earth (CMSE), that can accurately mesh the 3D geometry of the Earth’s surface under the Cartesian coordinate frame, while retaining the geodetic directions. To benchmark our new package, we calculate the residual amplitude of the CMSE synthetics with respect to the reference synthetics calculated by SPECFEM3D_Globe. In the regional scale simulations with an area of 1300 km × 1300 km, we find a maximum of 5% amplitude residual for the SPECFEM3D_Cartesian synthetics using the mesh generated by the CMSE, much smaller than the maximum amplitude residual of 100% for the synthetics based on its built-in meshing tool. Therefore, our new meshing tool CMSE overcomes the limitations of the internal mesher used by SPECFEM3D_Cartesian and can be used for more accurate waveform simulations in larger regions beyond one UTM zone. Furthermore, CMSE can deal with regions at the south and north poles that cannot be handled by the UTM projection. Although other external code packages can be used to mesh the curvature of the Earth, the advantage of the CMSE code is that it is open-source, easy to use, and fully integrated with SPECFEM3D_Cartesian.

Monte-Carlo simulation for moderate seismic zones using artificial accelerograms

The present technical note deals with a new method to generate seismic accelerograms based on statistical characteristics and the classification of seismic waves. A short heterogeneous sitebased analyse of these accelerograms is given with a seismic wave propagation code in 1D. After, a numerical simulation is done in order to obtain PGA using Newmark’s explicit scheme, and finally, Monte-Carlo simulation is used to determinate failure’s probability of structures localised in moderate seismic zones in hexagonal France.

Imaging Complex Subsurface Structures for Geothermal Exploration at Pirouette Mountain and Eleven-Mile Canyon in Nevada

Accurate imaging of subsurface complex structures with faults is crucial for geothermal exploration because faults are generally the primary conduit of hydrothermal flow. It is very challenging to image geothermal exploration areas because of complex geologic structures with various faults and noisy surface seismic data with strong and coherent ground-roll noise. In addition, fracture zones and most geologic formations behave as anisotropic media for seismic-wave propagation. Properly suppressing ground-roll noise and accounting for subsurface anisotropic properties are essential for high-resolution imaging of subsurface structures and faults for geothermal exploration. We develop a novel wavenumber-adaptive bandpass filter to suppress the ground-roll noise without affecting useful seismic signals. This filter adaptively exploits both characteristics of the lower frequency and the smaller velocity of the ground-roll noise than those of the signals. Consequently, this filter can effectively differentiate the ground-roll noise from the signal. We use our novel filter to attenuate the ground-roll noise in seismic data along five survey lines acquired by the U.S. Navy Geothermal Program Office at Pirouette Mountain and Eleven-Mile Canyon in Nevada, United States. We then apply our novel anisotropic least-squares reverse-time migration algorithm to the resulting data for imaging subsurface structures at the Pirouette Mountain and Eleven-Mile Canyon geothermal exploration areas. The migration method employs an efficient implicit wavefield-separation scheme to reduce image artifacts and improve the image quality. Our results demonstrate that our wavenumber-adaptive bandpass filtering method successfully suppresses the strong and coherent ground-roll noise in the land seismic data, and our anisotropic least-squares reverse-time migration produces high-resolution subsurface images of Pirouette Mountain and Eleven-Mile Canyon, facilitating accurate fault interpretation for geothermal exploration.

A Perfectly Matched Layer Technique Applied to Lattice Spring Model in Seismic Wavefield Forward Modeling for Poisson’s Solids

ABSTRACT As a complementary way to traditional wave-equation-based forward modeling methods, lattice spring model (LSM) is introduced into seismology for wavefield modeling owing to its remarkable stability, high-calculation accuracy, and flexibility in choosing simulation meshes, and so forth. The LSM simulates seismic-wave propagation from a micromechanics perspective, thus enjoying comprehensive characterization of elastic dynamics in complex media. Incorporating an absorbing boundary condition (ABC) is necessary for wavefield modeling to avoid the artificial reflections caused by truncated boundaries. To the best of our knowledge, the perfectly matched layer (PML) method has been a routine ABC in the wave-equation-based numerical modeling of wave physics. However, it has not been used in the nonwave-equation-based LSM simulations. In this work, we want to apply PML to LSM to attenuate the boundary reflections. We divide the whole simulation region into PML region and inner region, PML region surrounds the inner region. To incorporate PML to LSM, we establish elastic-wave equations corresponding to LSM. The simulation in the PML region is conducted using the established wave equations and the simulation in the inner region is conducted using LSM. Three simulation examples show that the PML scheme is effective and outperforms Gaussian ABC.

The Characteristics of Seismic Rotations in VTI Medium

Under the assumptions of linear elasticity and small deformation in traditional elastodynamics, the anisotropy of the medium has a significant effect on rotations observed during earthquakes. Based on the basic theory of the first-order velocity-stress elastic wave equation, this paper simulates the seismic wave propagation of the translational and rotational motions in two-dimensional isotropic and VTI (transverse isotropic media with a vertical axis of symmetry) media under different source mechanisms with the staggered-grid finite-difference method with respect to nine different seismological models. Through comparing the similarities and differences between the translational and rotational components of the wave fields, this paper focuses on the influence of anisotropic parameters on the amplitude and phase characteristics of the rotations. We verify that the energy of S waves in the rotational components is significantly stronger than that of P waves, and the response of rotations to the anisotropic parameters is more sensitive. There is more abundant information in the high-frequency band of the rotational components. With the increase of Thomsen anisotropic parameters ε and δ, the energy of the rotations increases gradually, which means that the rotational component observation may be helpful to the study of anisotropic parameters.

Analytical 1D transfer functions for layered soils

Transfer functions are constantly used in both Seismology and Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering to relate seismic displacement at different depths within strata. In the context of Diffusive Theory, they also appear in the expression of the imaginary part of 1D Green's functions. In spite of its remarkable importance, their mathematical structure is not fully understood yet, except in the simplest cases of two or three layers at most. This incomplete understanding, in particular as to the effect of increasing number of layers, hinders progress in some areas, as researchers have to resort to expensive and less conclusive numerical parametric studies. This text presents the general form of transfer functions for any number of layers, overcoming the above issues. Owing to the formal connection between seismic wave propagation and other phenomena that, in essence, represent different instances of wave propagation in a linear-elastic medium, one can extend the results derived elsewhere [Garcia-Suarez, Joaquin. 2021. “Trace Spectrum of 1D Transfer Matrices for Wave Propagation in Layered Media.” engrXiv. June 24. doi:10.31224/osf.io/ygt8z] in the context of longitudinal wave propagation in modular rods to seismic response of stratified sites. The knowledge of the general closed-form expression of the transfer functions allows to analytically characterize the long-wavelength asymptotics of the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio for any number of layers.