Effect of uneven noise source and/or station distribution on estimating the azimuth anisotropy of surface waves

With the development of the dense array, the surface wave velocity and azimuthal anisotropy under the array can be directly obtained by beamforming the noise cross-correlation functions (NCFs). However, the retrieval of the Green's function by cross-correlating the seismic noise requires that the noise source has a uniform distribution. For the case with uneven noise source, the azimuthal dependence on the sources in the expression for the spatial coherence function, which corresponds to the NCF in the time domain, has the same form as the azimuthal dependence of the surface wave velocity in weakly anisotropic media. Therefore, the uneven noise source will affect the surface wave anisotropy extraction. In this study, three passive seismic methods, i.e., beamforming, SPAC (spatial autocorrelation), and NCF, are compared to demonstrate that an uneven source distribution and uneven station distribution have equivalent effects on the outcome from each method. A beamforming method is proposed to directly extract the velocity and azimuthal anisotropy of surface waves. The effect of uneven noise source and/or station distribution on estimating the azimuth anisotropy of surface waves was investigated using data from the ChinArray Phase II. A method for correcting the apparent anisotropy in beamforming results caused by an uneven station distribution is suggested.