Analysis of passive surface waves from ambient-noise recordings

Abstract

Surface waves, considered to be the most difficult type of coherent noise present on land seismic reflection data, carry useful information regarding S-wave velocities. The advantage of analyzing surface waves is that they are recorded using vertical component geophones but provide information that is usually obtained from seismic data recorded with three-component geophones. Nowadays, active and passive surface waves are analyzed to determine the distribution of the S-wave velocities in the near surface. One application of near-surface velocities is for determining microseismic event locations, especially for surface and shallow well geophone arrays.