Surface wave analysis for near surface applications / Анализ поверхностных волн для применения вблизи поверхности

As very well known from basic seismology courses, fundamentally there are two kinds of seismic waves: those propagating inside a medium (body waves) and those traveling along the very shallow part of it (surface waves (SWs)). Compressional waves (commonly indicated as P waves) and shear waves (S waves) are body waves while Rayleigh, Scholte, Stoneley, and Love waves are different kinds of SWs. In the last decades, a number of papers dealing with SWs have been published but it must be recalled that their theoretical description and first applications date back to almost a century ago.

SWs have been in fact used for a number of applications since the 1920s: Nondestructive testing (even for medical applications), geotechnical studies, and crustal seismology (e.g., Gutenberg, 1924; Evison et al., 1959; Viktorov., 1967; McMechan and Yedlin, 1981; Kovach, 1978; Roesset, 1998; Stokoe et al., 1988; Stokoe and Santamarina, 2000; Jшrgensen and Kundu, 2002; O’Neill et al., 2003; 2004; Gaherty, 2004; Pedersen et al., 2006; Luo et al., 2007; O’Connell and Turner, 2011; Prodehl et al., 2013). Recently the interest toward their application has increased both for the increasing demand for efficientmethodologies to apply in geotechnical studies and because the recent regulations addressing the assessment of the seismic hazard (see for instance the Eurocode8) are giving the necessary emphasis to the determination of the shear-wave velocity vertical profile. Because of their practical importance and wide use in a number of near-surface applications, we will focus our interest on Rayleigh and Love waves in the following. <...>