Manipulation of seismic Rayleigh waves using a phase-gradient rubber metasurface

In this paper, a new method is proposed to manipulate seismic Rayleigh waves using phase-gradient metasurfaces. This highly compact artificial structure enables the anomalous refraction of Rayleigh waves according to the generalized Snell’s law (GSL). The soil-embedded metasurface is composed of only one column of commercial rubber blocks, which can provide an accurate phase shift to the Rayleigh wave. To verify the flexibility of this method, several metasurfaces are designed. Numerical results demonstrate that the Rayleigh waves can be focused, split, or converted into evanescent waves by using specific phase gradient configurations. The investigation also suggests the strong potential of metasurface as a smart device for shielding of seismic surface waves.

Application of a complete workflow for 2D elastic full-waveform inversion to recorded shallow-seismic Rayleigh waves

The S-wave velocity of the shallow subsurface can be inferred from shallow-seismic Rayleigh waves. Traditionally, the dispersion curves of the Rayleigh waves are inverted to obtain the (local) S-wave velocity as a function of depth. Two-dimensional elastic full-waveform inversion (FWI) has the potential to also infer lateral variations. We have developed a novel workflow for the application of 2D elastic FWI to recorded surface waves. During the preprocessing, we apply a line-source simulation (spreading correction) and perform an a priori estimation of the attenuation of waves. The iterative multiscale 2D elastic FWI workflow consists of the preconditioning of the gradients in the vicinity of the sources and a source-wavelet correction. The misfit is defined by the least-squares norm of normalized wavefields. We apply our workflow to a field data set that has been acquired on a predominantly depth-dependent velocity structure, and we compare the reconstructed S-wave velocity model with the result obtained by a 1D inversion based on wavefield spectra (Fourier-Bessel expansion coefficients). The 2D S-wave velocity model obtained by FWI shows an overall depth dependency that agrees well with the 1D inversion result. Both models can explain the main characteristics of the recorded seismograms. The small lateral variations in S-wave velocity introduced by FWI additionally explain the lateral changes of the recorded Rayleigh waves. The comparison thus verifies the applicability of our 2D FWI workflow and confirms the potential of FWI to reconstruct shallow small-scale lateral changes of S-wave velocity.

The role of attenuation in 2D full-waveform inversion of shallow-seismic body and Rayleigh waves

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) of Rayleigh waves is attractive for shallow geotechnical investigations due to the high sensitivity of Rayleigh waves to the S-wave velocity structure of the subsurface. In shallow-seismic field data, the effects of anelastic damping are significant. Dissipation results in a low-pass effect as well as frequency-dependent decay with offset. We found this by comparing recorded waveforms with elastic and viscoelastic wave simulation. The effects of anelastic damping must be considered in FWI of shallow-seismic Rayleigh waves. FWI using elastic simulation of wave propagation failed in synthetic inversion tests in which we tried to reconstruct the S-wave velocity in a viscoelastic model. To overcome this, [Formula: see text]-values can be estimated from the recordings to quantify viscoelasticity. Waveform simulation in the FWI then uses these a priori values when inferring seismic velocities and density. A source-wavelet correction, which is inevitable in FWI of field data, can compensate a significant fraction of the residuals between elastically and viscoelastically simulated data by narrowing the signals’ bandwidth. This way, elastic simulation becomes applicable in FWI of data from anelastic media. This approach, however, was not able to produce a frequency-dependent amplitude decay with offset. Reconstruction, therefore, was more accurate when using appropriate viscoelastic modeling in FWI of shallow-seismic Rayleigh waves. We found this by synthetic inversion tests using elastic forward simulation as well as viscoelastic simulation with different a priori values for [Formula: see text].