Potential Misidentification of Love-Wave Phase Velocity Based on Three-Component Ambient Seismic Noise

Abstract

People have calculated Rayleigh-wave phase velocities from vertical component of ambient seismic noise for several years. Recently, researchers started to extract Love waves from transverse component recordings of ambient noise, where “transverse” is defined as the direction perpendicular to a great-circle path or a line in small scale through observation sensors. Most researches assumed Rayleigh waves could be negligible, but Rayleigh waves can exist in the transverse component when Rayleigh waves propagate in other directions besides radial direction. In study of data acquired in western Junggar Basin near Karamay city, China, after processing the transverse component recordings of ambient noise, we obtain two energy trends, which are distinguished with Rayleigh-wave and Love-wave phase velocities, in the frequency–velocity domain using multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW). Rayleigh waves could be also extracted from the transverse component data. Because Rayleigh-wave and Love-wave phase velocities are close in high frequencies (>0.1 Hz), two kinds of surface waves might be merged in the frequency–velocity domain. Rayleigh-wave phase velocities may be misidentified as Love-wave phase velocities. To get accurate surface-wave phase velocities from the transverse component data using seismic interferometry in investigating the shallow geology, our results suggest using MASW to calculate real Love-wave phase velocities.