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Application of simulated annealing inversion on high-frequency fundamental-mode Rayleigh wave dispersion curves

Donghong Pei, John N. Louie, & Satish K. Pullammanappallil

Published 2007, SCEC Contribution #1350

First we implemented a forward computation of Rayleigh-wave dispersion curves from 1-D velocity profiles by the reflectivity-transmission method in terms of generalized reflection and transmission coefficients. The implementation is tested through the comparison of calculated phase velocities in various modes by our own code with those by the well-known Herrmann and Ammon’s code. Both calculations yield identical dispersion curves to 1% in various modes, indicating our forward modeling code is correct and stable. As a second step, we use the simulated annealing (SA) method for the inversion of phase velocity dispersion curves of the fundamental-mode Rayleigh waves. SA makes use of thermodynamic analogies based on the Gibb’s distribution to find the global minimum of a nonlinear error function. The mean and variance on estimates of shear-wave velocities are approximated using a procedure based on the same thermodynamic analogies. Tests on both field and synthetic Rayleigh dispersion data show that the SA works well for inverting phase velocity dispersion curves of high-frequency fundamental-mode Rayleigh waves.

http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/papers/Pei-et-al-SA-rev.pdf

Key Words
SV-waves, body waves, imagery, guided waves, data acquisition, geophysical methods, data processing, elastic waves, Rayleigh waves, seismic methods, theoretical studies, surface waves, digital simulation, velocity, seismic waves, wave dispersion, S-waves

Citation
Pei, D., Louie, J. N., & Pullammanappallil, S. K. (2007). Application of simulated annealing inversion on high-frequency fundamental-mode Rayleigh wave dispersion curves. Geophysics, 72(5), R77-R85. doi: 10.1190/1.2752529 .