Publications
Surface Wave Simulation and Processing with MatSeis
Chael, Eric P.; Young, Christopher J.
In order to exploit the information on surface wave propagation that is stored in large seismic event datasets, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have developed a MatSeis interface for performing phase-matched filtering of Rayleigh arrivals. MatSeis is a Matlab-based seismic processing toolkit which provides graphical tools for analyzing seismic data from a network of stations. Tools are available for spectral and polarization measurements, as well as beam forming and f-k analysis with array data, to name just a few. Additionally, one has full access to the Matlab environment and any functions available there. Previously the authors reported the development of new MatSeis tools for calculating regional discrimination measurements. The first of these performs Lg coda analysis as developed by Mayeda and coworkers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A second tool measures regional phase amplitude ratios for an event and compares the results to ratios from known earthquakes and explosions. Release 1.5 of MatSeis includes the new interface for the analysis of surface wave arrivals. This effort involves the use of regionalized dispersion models from a repository of surface wave data and the construction of phase-matched filters to improve surface wave identification, detection, and magnitude calculation. The tool works as follows. First, a ray is traced from source to receiver through a user-defined grid containing different group velocity versus period values to determine the composite group velocity curve for the path. This curve is shown along with the upper and lower group velocity bounds for reference. Next, the curve is used to create a phase-matched filter, apply the filter, and show the resultant waveform. The application of the filter allows obscured Rayleigh arrivals to be more easily identified. Finally, after screening information outside the range of the phase-matched filter, an inverse version of the filter is applied to obtain a cleaned raw waveform which can be used for amplitude measurements. Because all the MatSeis tools have been written as Matlab functions, they can be easily modified to experiment with different processing details. The performance of the propagation models can be evaluated using any event available in the repository of surface wave events.