Retrieving impulse response function amplitudes from the ambient seismic field

S U M M A R Y Seismic interferometry is now widely used to retrieve the impulse response function of the Earth between two distant seismometers. The phase information has been the focus of most passive imaging studies, as conventional seismic tomography uses traveltime measurements. The amplitude information, however, is harder to interpret because it strongly depends on the distribution of ambient seismic field sources and on the multitude of processing methods. Our study focuses on the latter by comparing the amplitudes of the impulse response functions calculated between seismic stations in the Kanto sedimentary basin, Japan, using several processing techniques. This region provides a unique natural laboratory to test the reliability of the amplitudes with complex wave propagation through the basin, and dense observations from the Metropolitan Seismic Observation network. We compute the impulse response functions using the cross correlation, coherency and deconvolution techniques of the raw ambient seismic field and the cross correlation of 1-bit normalized data. To validate the amplitudes of the impulse response functions, we use a shallow Mw 5.8 earthquake that occurred on the eastern edge of Kanto Basin and close to a station that is used as the virtual source. Both S and surface waves are retrieved in the causal part of the impulse response functions computed with all the different techniques. However, the amplitudes obtained from the deconvolution method agree better with those of the earthquake. Despite the expected wave attenuation due to the soft sediments of the Kanto Basin, seismic amplification caused by the basin geometry dominates the amplitudes of S and surface waves and is captured by the ambient seismic field. To test whether or not the anticausal part of the impulse response functions from deconvolution also contains reliable amplitude information, we use another virtual source located on the western edge of the basin. We show that the surface wave amplitudes of the anticausal part agree well with those of a shallow Mw 4.7 event that occurred close to the virtual source. This study demonstrates that the deconvolution technique seems to be the best strategy to retrieve reliable relative amplitudes from the ambient seismic field in the Kanto Basin.