Required distribution of noise sources for Green's function recovery in diffusive fields

In the most general sense, noise is the part of the signal of little or no interest, due to a multitude of reasons such as operator error, imperfect instrumentation, experiment design, or inescapable background interference. Considering the latter, it has been shown that Green's function can be extracted from cross-correlation of the ambient, diffusive wavefields arising from background random noise sources. Pore pressure and low-frequency electromagnetic induction are two such examples of diffusive fields. In theory, applying Green's function method in geophysical exploration requires infinity of volumetrically distributed sources; however, in the real world the number of noise sources in an area is limited, and furthermore, unevenly distributed in time, space and spectral content. Hence, quantification of the requisite noise sources that enable us to calculate Green's function acceptably well remains an open research question. The purpose of this study is to find the area of noise sources that contribute most to the Green's function estimation in diffusive systems. We call such a region the Volume of Relevance (VoR). Our analysis builds upon recent work in 1D homogeneous system where it was shown that sources located between two receivers positions are the most important ones for the purpose of Green's function recovery. Our results confirm the previous finding but we also examine the effect of heterogeneity, dimensionality and receiver location in both 1D and 2D at a fixed frequency. We demonstrate that for receivers located symmetrically across an interface between regions of contrasting diffusivity, the VoR rapidly shifts from one side of the interface to the other, and back again, as receiver separation increases. We also demonstrate that where the receiver pair is located on the interface itself, the shifting is less rapid, and for moderate to high diffusivity contrasts, the VoR remains entirely on the more diffusive side. In addition, because classical diffusivity plays a role analogous to resistivity our results suggest that the VoR for the latter is dominated by the air region when the receivers are located on Earth's surface - a finding that demonstrates the minimal impact of subsurface noise sources for EGF estimation in surface-based geophysical experiment design.