Numerical analysis of the geophysical parameter sensitivity on the multimode Love wave dispersion curves

Abstract

The characteristics of multimode Love wave dispersion curves are dependent on various geophysical parameters, namely shear wave velocity (SWV), layer thickness and density. This paper presents a novel numerical analysis of these parameters to determine which ones have a significant effect on the dispersion curves of multimode Love waves. Identifying parameter sensitivity is a crucial step in the inversion procedure of geophysical modeling. Our numerical analysis focuses on perturbing three geophysical parameters that influence the dispersion curves. The results confirm that SWV parameter is the most sensitive. By employing the same perturbation procedure, our numerical analysis reveals that the SWV parameter has a highly significant impact on the multimode Love wave dispersion curves. The average relative error (RE) values are found to be 27.33% for alpha = −0.2 and 25.51% for alpha = +0.2. Conversely, perturbing the layer thickness parameter demonstrates no significant influence on the dispersion curves, resulting in average RE values of 5.69% for alpha = −0.2 and 7.96% for alpha = +0.2. Furthermore, the perturbation of the density parameter exhibits an extremely negligible impact on the multimode Love wave dispersion curves, with average RE values on the order of 10 ^−14 %.

Keywords

• geophysical parameter sensitivity
• Love wave dispersion curves
• parameter perturbation
• cut-off frequency
• relative error