Surface Wave Multipathing and its Influence on Phase Velocities Measured by Small Networks

Networks of temporary broadband seismological stations are commonly deployed over dedicated targets. Measurement of surface wave phase velocity across the network and its depth-inversion gives us information about the structure below the network which is complementary to the information obtained from body-wave analysis. For small networks, we face however the fundamental problem that the dimensions of the heterogeneities to image are not large compared to the wavelengths of the surface waves used to image them. In addition, multipathing is very common is teleseismic surface waves at moderate frequencies and the complexity of the incoming wavefield has to be taken into account during the tomographic process. We perform a series of numerical simulations of surface wave propagation in 3-D structures using complex incoming wavefields in order to analyse how the nature of the incoming wavefield plays together with the 3-D structure to determine phases and amplitudes at the different stations of a network. We analyse how different tomographic methods cope with the complex wavefield, the consequences on the resolution of the resulting tomographic models and we try to provide recommendations for data selection. The numerical simulations are done using a multiple-scattering mode coupling scheme. The amount of multipathing is taken from a recent study using teleseismic surface waves recorded on a temporary network in Southern Norway. The period range of 20 to 200s and the 450km x 600km dimension of the network is also taken form the same study.