Surface wave modelling and near surface characterization background

Andrew Mills, Raul Cova, Kristopher A. Innanen

Commonly, ground roll "noise" is removed from seismic data, and discarded. While inconvenient for reflection surveying, this apparent noise contains valuable information about the near surface. In this paper, near surface velocity and density models are constructed, and used to model elastic wave propagation of Rayleigh waves through the near surface. Existing near surface characterization techniques are briefly summarized, and used as the basis for this project. Through increasing the complexity or the near surface, issues or shortcomings in existing methods arise in Rayleigh wave dispersion analysis. These issues are identified, and methods of overcoming them are proposed.