The utility of the multi-channel analysis of surface waves (MASW) seismic method for noninvasive assessment of earthen levees was evaluated for a section of the Citrus Lakefront Levee, New Orleans, Louisiana. This test was conducted after the New Orleans’ area levee system had been stressed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The MASW data were acquired in a seismically noisy, urban environment using...

Structural damage can be controlled in performance based seismic design (PBSD) according to the requirement under a certain hazard level. During strong ground motion (GM) such buildings suffer minor to major damages depending on the shaking level of GM. The available damage assessment methods are complex, tedious and time-consuming procedure. In the present study, a simplified empirical model h...

In this study, a shaking-table test was performed to verify a proposed discretetime modal control method that is suitable for seismic control of structural systems and also easy for digital control implementation. The computation of the feedback gain is formulated in a discrete-time domain and is given in a concise matrix form. A method for generating the best achievable eigenvectors that are m...

In this paper, we present an algorithm for seismic source wavelet estimation that is based on seismic time frequency spectral decomposition with matching pursuit technique. The main assumption of this algorithm is that the source wavelet is stationary for single wavelet estimation in a selected time window and that the source wavelet has normalized energy to avoid scale ambiguity between reflec...

We have developed an inversion formulation for velocity and attenuation structure using seismic attributes, including envelope amplitude, instantaneous frequency and arrival times of selected seismic phases. We refer to this approach as AFT inversion for amplitude, (instantaneous) frequency and time. Complex trace analysis is used to extract the different seismic attributes. The instantaneous f...

In part II of this two-part tutorial we review the underlying theory of seismic interferometry and discuss various new advances. In the 1990’s the method of time-reversed acoustics was developed. This method employs the fact that the acoustic wave equation for a lossless medium is invariant for time-reversal. When ultrasonic responses recorded by piezoelectric transducers are reversed in time a...

We report precursory seismic patterns prior to the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, as measured by four different methods based on changes in seismicity that can be used for earthquake forecasting: the b-value method, two methods of seismic quiescence evaluation, and an analysis of seismicity density in space and time. The spatial extent of precursory patterns differs from one method to the other and...

Sarcheshmeh copper mine, with the final reserves of 828 million tons of sulfur ore and average grade of 0.74%, is known to be the largest open pit of Iran and most probably the second largest copper mine in the world. This mine is located in the seismotectonic zone of Central-Iran, and 23 Km away from the 150 Km long Rafsanjan active fault.In this study the vulnerability of the west wall of the...

An analysis of a passive seismic method for subsurface imaging is presented, in which ambient seismic noise is employed as the source of illumination of underground scatterers. The imaging algorithm can incorporate new data into the image in a recursive fashion, which causes image background noise to diminish over time. Under the assumption of spatially-incoherent ambient noise, an analytical e...