Shallow surface wave inversion ? research and applications in Western Australia

Abstract

Existing surface wave modelling methods fail to correctly interpret some critical engineering scenarios, for example Earth models comprising `soft' under `hard' layers. Numerical and experimental repeatability analyses and the use of synthetic seismograms to reproduce the field data exactly, accounting for all superposed modes, leads to a better understanding of resolution and accuracy of the inversion results. An inversion scheme based on the observation of an `effective mode' phase velocity, whilst employing realistic error envelopes, has proved more successful than conventional methods, and demonstrated the need for array length at least 2.5 times the depth of investigation.