Application of a simplified calculation for full-wave microtremor H/V spectral ratio based on the diffuse field approximation to identify underground velocity structures

Abstract

Abstract Under the diffuse field approximation, the full-wave (FW) microtremor H/V spectral ratio (H/V) is modeled as the square root of the ratio of the sum of imaginary parts of the Green’s function of the horizontal components to that of the vertical one. For a given layered medium, the FW H/V can be well approximated with only surface waves (SW) H/V of the “cap-layered” medium which consists of the given layered medium and a new larger velocity half-space (cap layer) at large depth. Because the contribution of surface waves can be simply obtained by the residue theorem, the computation of SW H/V of cap-layered medium is faster than that of FW H/V evaluated by discrete wavenumber method and contour integration method. The simplified computation of SW H/V was then applied to identify the underground velocity structures at six KiK-net strong-motion stations. The inverted underground velocity structures were used to evaluate FW H/Vs which were consistent with the SW H/Vs of corresponding cap-layered media. The previous study on surface waves H/Vs proposed with the distributed surface sources assumption and a fixed Rayleigh-to-Love waves amplitude ratio for horizontal motions showed a good agreement with the SW H/Vs of our study. The consistency between observed and theoretical spectral ratios, such as the earthquake motions of H/V spectral ratio and spectral ratio of horizontal motions between surface and bottom of borehole, indicated that the underground velocity structures identified from SW H/V of cap-layered medium were well resolved by the new method.

Keywords

• Diffuse field approximation
• Microtremor H/V spectral ratio
• Full-wave
• Surface waves
• Underground velocity structures