ARTICLE

P- and S-wave separation and decomposition of two- and three-component elastic seismograms

WENLONG WANG1 GEORGE A. MCMECHAN2
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1 Department of Mathematics, Harbin Institute of Technology, 92 Xidazhi St., Nangang Dist., Harbin, Heilongjiang 150001, P.R. China.,
2 Center for Lithospheric Studies, The University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080-3021, U.S.A.,
JSE 2019, 28(5), 425–447;
Submitted: 9 June 2025 | Revised: 9 June 2025 | Accepted: 9 June 2025 | Published: 9 June 2025
© 2025 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

Wang, W. and McMechan, G.A., 2019. P- and S-wave separation and decomposition of two- and three-component elastic seismograms. Journal of Seismic Exploration, 28: 425-447. Multi-component seismic data are valuable in estimating subsurface elastic parameters. The coexistence of P- and S-waves in multi-component surface seismic data poses an obstacle in extracting the elastic properties. Thus, it is crucial to separate the P- and S-waves in elastic seismograms, or during wavefield extrapolations. We analyze an algorithm that can perform both P- and S-wave separation and vector decomposition of multi-component elastic seismograms that are collected from various media, including isotropie, heterogeneous and transversely isotropie, and we extend it to 3D. This algorithm is based on the dispersion relations of P- and S-waves in isotropic and anisotropic wavefields; the near-surface velocity zone can be separated into several segments horizontally to handle heterogeneity. The algorithm is efficient, and no elastic wavefield extrapolations are needed to perform the separation or decomposition, so no subsurface information is needed, apart from the near-surface model parameters (i.e., P- and S-wave velocities, anisotropic parameters) along the receiver arrays. Tests with synthetic data from various 2D and 3D models show high accuracy by comparing the separation and decomposition results from benchmarks that can only be obtained during elastic wavefield forward modeling.

Keywords
elastic
seismogram
separation
decomposition
3D
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing