Modified frequency–Bessel transform method for dispersion imaging of Rayleigh waves from ambient seismic noise

Abstract

SUMMARY Ambient noise surface wave methods have gained much attention among geophysical and civil engineering communities because of their capability of determining near-surface shear wave velocities in highly populated urban areas. Higher mode information of surface waves is important in dispersion curve inversion for shear wave velocity structure. The frequency–Bessel (F-J) transform method is an effective tool for multimode surface wave extraction, which has been applied to multiscale investigations of the Earth structure. The measured dispersion energy with the F-J method, however, would usually be contaminated by a type of ‘crossed’ artefacts at high frequencies, which are caused by spatial aliasing and bidirectional velocity scan of dispersion analysis methods. The ‘crossed’ artefacts usually cross and smear the true dispersion energy in the frequency–velocity domain. We propose a modified F-J (MFJ) transform method in which the Bessel function is replaced by the Hankel function for dispersion analysis of empirical Green's function. The MFJ method performs a unidirectional velocity scanning on the outgoing wave to avoid the ‘crossed’ artefacts. Synthetic and real-world examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFJ method in improving the accuracy of Rayleigh wave multimode dispersion measurements.