Improved inversion algorithms for near-surface characterization

Near-surface geophysical imaging is often performed by generating surface waves, and estimating the subsurface properties through inversion, that is, iteratively matching experimentally observed dispersion curves with predicted curves from a layered half-space model of the subsurface. Key to the effectiveness of inversion is the efficiency and accuracy of computing the dispersion curves and their derivatives. This paper presents improved methodologies for both dispersion curve and derivative computation. First, it is shown that the dispersion curves can be computed more efficiently by combining an unconventional complex-length finite element method (CFEM) to model the finite depth layers, with perfectly matched discrete layers (PMDL) to model the unbounded half-space. Second, based on analytical derivatives for theoretical dispersion curves, an approximate derivative is derived for the so-called effective dispersion curve for realistic geophysical surface response data. The new derivative computation has a smoothing effect on the computation of derivatives, in comparison with traditional finite difference (FD) approach, and results in faster convergence. In addition, while the computational cost of FD differentiation is proportional to the number of model parameters, the new differentiation formula has a computational cost that is almost independent of the number of model parameters. At the end, as confirmed by synthetic and real-life imaging examples, the combination of CFEM + PMDL for dispersion calculation and the new differentiation formula results in more accurate estimates of the subsurface characteristics than the traditional methods, at a small fraction of computational effort.