PLENARY LECTURE - Passive seismic methods for site characterization

Abstract

Site characterization methods to extract the shear-wave velocity (Vs) structure over the first few tens to few hundred of meters or the soil’s resonance frequency using seismic noise recordings have become widespread over the last 40 years. Being cost-effective and easy to implement, especially in urban environment, passive seismic methods have been shown reliable to retrieve the soil resonance frequency and the Vs profile of near-surface geological layers. International efforts over the last 20 years have outlined the capabilities and limitations of passive seismic methods and lead to a series of good-of-practice, state-of-the-art and recommendations on data acquisition and processing. Recent methodological developments using three-component single-station and three-component array methods are promising approaches to better constrain Vs profiles. Also, the very high spatial and temporal resolution offered by the Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) makes this emerging technology one with very high potential for near-surface site characterization, especially in urban environment.

Full Paper