Effective seismic force retrieval from surface measurement for SH-wave reconstruction

We present a new method to obtain dynamic body force at virtual interfaces to reconstruct shear wave motions induced by a source outside a truncated computational domain. Specifically, a partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization method is used to minimize the misfit between measured motions at a limited number of sensors on the ground surface and their counterparts reconstructed from optimized forces. Numerical results show that the optimized forces accurately reconstruct the targeted ground motions in the surface and the interior of the domain. The proposed optimization framework yields a particular force vector among other valid solutions allowed by the domain reduction method (DRM). Per this optimized or inverted force vector, the reconstructed wave field is identical to its reference counterpart in the domain of interest but may differ in the exterior domain from the reference one. However, we remark that the inverted solution is valid and introduce a simple post-process that can modify the solution to achieve an alternative force vector corresponding to the reference wave field. We also study the desired sensor spacing to accurately reconstruct the wave responses for a given dominant frequency of interest. We remark that the presented method is omnidirectionally applicable in terms of the incident angle of an incoming wave and is effective for any given material heterogeneity and geometry of layering of a reduced domain. The presented inversion method requires information on the wave speeds and dimensions of only a reduced domain. Namely, it does not need any information on the geophysical profile of an enlarged domain or a seismic source profile outside a reduced domain. Thus, the computational cost of the method is compact even though it leads to the high-fidelity reconstruction of wave response in the reduced domain, allowing for studying and predicting ground and structural responses using real seismic measurements.