Multi-channel analysis of passive surface waves based on cross-correlations

Abstract:

Traditional active seismic survey can no longer be properly applied in highly populated urban areas due to restrictions in modern civilian life styles. Passive seismic methods, however, have gained much more attention from the engineering geophysics community because of their environmental friendly and deeper investigation depth. Due to extracting signal from noise has never been as comfortable as that in active seismic survey, how to make it more efficiently and accurately has been emphasized. We propose a multi-channel analysis of passive surface waves (MAPW) based on long noise sequences cross-correlations to meet the demand for increasing investigation depth by acquiring surface-wave data at a relative low-frequency range (1 Hz ≤ f ≤ 10 Hz) in urban areas. We utilize seismic interferometry to produce common virtual source gathers from one-hour-long noise records and do dispersion measurements by using the classic passive multi-channel analysis of surface waves (PMASW). We used synthetic tests to demonstrate the advantages of MAPW for various noise distributions. Results show that our method has the superiority of maximizing the analysis accuracy. Finally, we used two field data applications to demonstrate the advantages of our MAPW over the classic PMASW on isolating azimuth of the predominant noise sources and the effectivity of combined survey of active multi-channel analysis of surface waves (MASW) and MAPW. We suggest, for the field operation using MAPW, that a parallel receiver line which is close to a main road or river, if any, with one or two hours noise observation will be an effective means for an unbiased dispersion image.

Keywords: passive seismic method, MAPW, MASW, cross-correlation, directional noise source, spatial-aliasing effects, inversion