NON-LINEAR SURFACE WAVE PHASE VELOCITY INVERSION BASED ON RAY THEORY

Abstract

The development of temporary and permanent broad-band seismic arrays reinforces the need for advanced interpretation techniques in surface-wave analysis. We present a new method based on 2-D paraxial ray theory of inverting teleseismic surface-wave phase information and constructing phase velocity maps on a regional scale. Measurements of local phase velocities and propagation directions of Rayleigh waves taken from full waveform synthetic seismograms are used to validate the ray theory for smooth structures on a regional scale. Curved wavefronts created by heterogeneous structure outside the study area are taken into account through joint inversion for the phase velocity field and the shape of the incoming wavefronts. In the forward ray tracing procedure, the curved wavefronts are introduced through the boundary conditions by equating the slowness vector of the ray at the edge of the study region with the known gradient of the arrival time of the wave. To make the inverse problem non-singular we const