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Interpreting Surface-Wave Data For A Site With Shallow Bedrock, Daniel W. Casto, Barbara Luke, Carlos Calderon-Macias, Ronald Kaufmann

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

The inversion of dispersive Rayleigh-wave data has been shown to be successful in providing reliable estimated shear-wave velocities within unconsolidated materials in the near surface. However, in a case where the multi-channel analysis of surface waves method was applied to a site consisting of clay residuum overlying basalt bedrock, inversion for the fundamental-mode Rayleigh wave resulted in shear-wave velocities within the rock that are less than half of expected values. Forward modeling reveals that the fundamental-mode dispersion curve is hardly sensitive to bedrock velocity perturbations over a practical range of wavelengths, leading to poorly constrained solutions. Standard surface-wave methods can …