Improvement of the objective function in the velocity structure inversion based on horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio of earthquake ground motions

SUMMARY Given the improvements that have been made in the forward calculations of seismic noise horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratios (NHVSRs) or earthquake ground motion HVSRs (EHVSRs), a number of HVSR inversion methods have been proposed to identify underground velocity structures. Compared with the studies on NHVSR inversion, the research on the EHVSR-based inversion methods is relatively rare. In this paper, to make full use of the widely available and constantly accumulating strong-motion observation data, we propose an S-wave HVSR inversion method based on diffuse-field approximation. Herein, the S-wave components of earthquake ground motion recordings are considered as data source. Improvements to the objective function has been achieved in this work. An objective function with the slope term is introduced. The new objective function can mitigate the multisolution phenomenon encountered when working with HVSR curves with multipeaks. Then, a synthetic case is used to show the verification of the proposed method and this method has been applied to invert underground velocity structures for six KiK-net stations based on earthquake observations. The results show that the proposed S-wave EHVSR inversion method is effective for identifying underground velocity structures.