SEISMIC NOISE ESTIMATION USING HORIZONTAL COMPONENTS

Abstract

The use of seismometer arrays containing both horizontal‐ and vertical‐component instruments for attenuation of surface‐wave noise has been studied theoretically. If a process can be defined to estimate the vertical noise component by operating on the outputs of one or more horizontal‐component seismometers, the estimate may be subtracted from the vertical‐component record to improve signal‐to‐noise ratio. The exact waveforms of vertically‐incident signals must be preserved in an operation of this kind. Formulas are developed to describe the response of a system employing three components measured at a single point. This system is found to be useful only in cases where the noise is strongly directional. A physical separation between the vertical‐ and horizontal‐component instruments is necessary to resolve the difficulties caused by uncertainties in the sense of the propagation velocity vector and particle orbit vector. Formulas, derived for systems consisting of circular rings of radially‐oriented horizontals and a central vertical show, that useful noise rejection can be obtained even in the most unfavorable case of uniform azimuthal noise distribution. The performance of arrays of this kind is not affected very much by uncorrelated noise or Love‐wave noise. Comparisons with similar arrays containing only vertical‐component seismometers indicate that, for some of the noise models studied, the multicomponent array should provide useful noise rejection over a greater bandwidth and at longer wavelengths than an all‐vertical array with the same dimensions.