Probing Near Surface Shear Velocity Structure from Ambient Noise and Surface Wave Array Tomography

Abstract

Ambient noise tomography has provided essential constraints on crustal and uppermost mantle (isotropic and anisotropic) shear velocity structure in global seismology. Recent studies demonstrate that high frequency (e.g., ~ 1 Hz) surface waves between receivers at short distances can be successfully retrieved from ambient noise cross-correlation and then be used for tomography of near surface shear velocity structures. This approach provides important information for strong ground motion prediction in urban area and near surface structure characterization in oil and gas fields. Here we first give a brief overview about the methodology of ambient noise tomography in global seismology. Then we focus on some recent developments on recovering near surface shear velocity structure using ambient noise tomography. We propose a new one-step iterative surface wave tomography approach that directly inverts all path-dependent dispersion data for 3-D shear wave speeds, in which we perform surface-wave ray tracing at each period using the fast marching method and update ray paths for the next step tomographic inversion. The proposed approach is more efficient than the traditional two-step surface wave tomography and provides a consistent framework for future joint surface wave and body wave travel time tomography.