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Published July 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Mapping the near-field scattered energy in sedimentary basins from ambient noise correlations

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon University of Paris-Saclay

Abstract

Precursory spurious arrivals, commonly observed in ambient noise correlations, are generated by near-field noise sources. We have developed an inversion method to evaluate the noise source distribution based on the precursory waves. This method is applied to the BASIN experiment in Los Angeles, revealing that the noise sources show coherent patterns with features like faults and structure boundaries. Our spectral analysis indicates that the energy of the noise source in generating the precursory signal is predominant at higher frequencies, suggesting a shallow source(<200m). We conclude that near-field noise is primarily produced by scattering from geological structures with significant velocity contrasts, such as faults at shallow depths. This method offers a new way to map faults using ambient noise correlations.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation awards 2105358 and 2105320. The BASIN project was partly supported by U.S. Geological Survey awards GS17AP00002 and G19AP00015, and Southern California Earthquake Center awards 18029 and 19033. We are grateful to Laura Ermert and an anonymous reviewer for their review of our manuscript. The study benefitted from discussions with Patricia Persaud, Ettore Biondi, Jorge Castellanos and Yan Yang.

Data Availability

The primary data used in this study (the BASIN data) are available from the IRIS Data Management Center. The code related to the inversion method is deposited on Github (https://github.com/Yidali26/ambient-noise-scatterer-mapping/).

Supplemental Material

ggaf170_Supplemental_File

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ggaf170.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
Software: https://github.com/Yidali26/ambient-noise-scatterer-mapping/ (URL)

Funding

National Science Foundation
2105358
National Science Foundation
EAR-2105320
United States Geological Survey
GS17AP00002
United States Geological Survey
G19AP00015
Southern California Earthquake Center
18029
Southern California Earthquake Center
19033

Dates

Accepted
2025-05-03
Available
2025-05-09
Published
Available
2025-05-24
Corrected and typeset

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Seismological Laboratory, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)
Publication Status
Published