A comparison of straight-ray and curved-ray surface wave tomography approaches at near-surface studies

Abstract. Surface waves are widely used to model shear-wave velocity of the subsurface. Surface wave tomography (SWT) has recently gained popularity for near-surface studies. Some researchers have used straight-ray SWT in which it is assumed that surface waves propagate along the straight line between receiver pairs. Alternatively, curved-ray SWT can be employed by computing the exact paths between the receiver pairs. SWT is a well-established method in seismology and has been employed in numerous seismological studies. However, it is important to make a comparison between these two SWT approaches for near-surface applications since the amount of information and the level of complexity in near-surface are different from seismological studies. We apply straight-ray and curved-ray SWT to four near-surface examples and compare the results in terms of the quality of the final model and the computational cost.