Ground-penetrating radar attenuation compensation by Gabor deconvolution: Seismogenic fault imaging at Castelluccio di Norcia (Central Italy)

Abstract

We test a seismic nonstationary Gabor deconvolution (GD) algorithm on synthetic and experimental ground-penetrating radar (GPR) profiles to evaluate how well this algorithm increases vertical resolution and removes attenuation effects from GPR data. Our field data set has been collected across a seismogenic fault in Central Italy, detecting this tectonic structure several years before the 2016–2017 seismic sequence which struck the region and produced coseismic ruptures along the same fault trace. We find that GPR mixed-phase data respond very well to the application of GD in comparison with the conventional and more standard Wiener-spiking deconvolution workflows. We observe a clear increase of the coherence and sharpness of reflection events as well as of hyperbolic diffractions in the fault zone. Gabor-processed GPR data significantly increase the GPR potential to image active Quaternary faults, therefore contributing to the definition of seismotectonic context and to seismic hazard assessment of a study region. We propose the use of the GD to increase interpretability of GPR profiles not only for the identification of tectonic structures but also to achieve high-quality images of the near surface in many GPR applications.