Seismic Traveltime Tomography in Inhomogeneous Anisotropic Media

불균질 이방성 매질에서의 탄성파 주시 토모그래피

  • Published : 2007.06.07

Abstract

In Korean geology that crystalline rock is dominant, the properties of subsurface including the anisotropy are distributed complexly and changed abruptly. Because of such geological environments, cross-hole seismic traveltime tomography is widely used to obtain the high resolution image of the subsurface for the engineering purposes in the geotechnical sites. However, because the cross-hole tomography has a wide propagation angle coverage relatively, its data tend to include the seismic velocity anisotropy comparing with the surface seismic methods. It can cause the misinterpretation that the cross-hole seismic data including the anisotropic effects are analyzed and treated with the general processing techniques assuming the isotropy. Therefore, we need to consider the seismic anisotropy in cross-hole seismic traveltime tomography. The seismic anisotropic tomography algorithm, which is developed for evaluation of the velocity anisotropy, includes several inversion schemes in order to make the inversion process stable and robust. First of all, the set of the inversion parameters is limited to one slowness, two ratios of slowness and one direction of the anisotropy symmetric axis. The ranges of the inversion parameters are localized by the pseudo-beta transform to obtain the reasonable inversion results and the inversion constraints are controlled efficiently by ACB(Active Constraint Balancing) method. Especially, the inversion using the Fresnel volume is applied to the anisotropic tomography and it can make the anisotropic tomography more stable than ray tomography as it widens the propagation angle coverage.

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