Two-dimensional Seismic Wave Modeling and Inversion by the Boundary Element Method

*Corresponding Author

Abstract

Surface wave methods (SWM) are widely used for the geophysical characterization
of geological bodies and tectonic structures in both Earth Sciences and Engineering.
SWMs exploit the dispersive nature of Rayleigh waves to indirectly estimate shear
wave velocity profiles from surface wave measurements, but they are limited to
parallel-layered geometries. To overcome such limitations, we exploit the Boundary
Element Method (BEM) to define a new class of geometric inversion models that
allows to go directly from raw measurements to estimating the shape of laterally
varying soil interfaces. The proposed approach enables a robust identification of the
subsurface geometry and it aims at filling the gap between the standard simplistic
parallel-layered-based SWM and the more complex three-dimensional Full Wave
Inversion (FWI) based on Finite Element Methods. Numerical tests on synthetic data
unveil the effectiveness of the inverse algorithm and its applicability to wave
measurements. An application to field data is finally presented.