Abstract
In a recent Geophysics Letter, Eisner et al. (2013) measure peak frequencies in velocity spectra of direct waves from microseismic events. The authors interpret these peak frequencies as being caused by attenuation and use them for estimating the effective Q -factor of the medium. Nevertheless, I point out a significant problem with these results, namely, that the authors’ model for the earthquake source is not accurate enough to allow the determination of Q for the surrounding medium. This can be seen by considering the following question: Do the Q values reported in Eisner et al. (2013) characterize the medium, the source model, or the spectral data for direct arrivals? Eisner et al. (2013) assume the first of these answers to be correct; however, careful analysis shows that the correct answer is actually the last one. In answering the above question, note that the Q and t * values measured by this method are not unique physical properties of the medium because they change whenever a different source model is used. The flat plateau at f f c in the Eisner et al. (2013) source spectrum is unrealistic, and yet this plateau is the principal tool of the authors’ method for Q estimation. If we use, for example, Brune’s (1970) model as a more accurate one, then the Q would be much larger than the values reported by Eisner et al. (2013) (see the subsection “Meaning of Q ” below). Thus, the inferred Q s follow from the assumed source model. However, these Q values still cannot be viewed as corrections to the source model because even after these corrections, the model fits the observations very poorly (see the subsection “Data fit”). Therefore, the Q values proposed by Eisner et al. (2013) can only be interpreted as the observed spectral-peak frequencies heuristically multiplied by traveltimes: …
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