Surface Wave Tomography (SWT) is used to build shear-wave velocity models. In some studies, it is assumed that surface waves propagation follows a straight line between the source and the receiver. This assumption might be violated in near-surface studies because of high level of complexity and lateral heterogeneity. In curved-ray SWT, the actual ray paths between every receiver couple are computed. Curved-ray SWT can increase the accuracy of the model and will increase the computational effort. It is important to investigate the gained model improvement together with the associated additional computational cost from curved-ray over straight-ray SWT for near-surface applications. We apply straight- and curved-ray SWT on a generated 3D synthetic dataset and compare the results in terms of accuracy and computational costs. ... Read more

Surface Wave Tomography is used to obtain a shear wave velocity model by inverting computed dispersion curves. Body Wave Tomography is used to obtain a longitudinal wave model through travel time inversion of picked first break travel times. Individual inversions suffer from various different limitations. Joint surface and body wave tomography inversion aims to reduce the limitations and produce better subsurface velocity models than either individual inversion. We integrate these two methods by inverting dispersion curves and first breaks simultaneously in a 2D joint inversion scheme. We propose a joint inversion algorithm in which Poisson’s ratio provides the physical link between the shear and longitudinal wave velocities. The joint inversion results show encouraging improvements compared with individual inversion results. ... Read more