Full-field multidimensional deconvolution to retrieve body-wave reflections from sparse passive sources

Our objective is to complement lithospheric seismic tomography with an interferometric method to retrieve high-resolution reflectivity images from local earthquake recordings. The disadvantage of using local earthquakes for the retrieval of reflected body-waves is their usual sparse distribution. We propose an alternative formulation of passive seismic interferometry by multidimensional deconvolution (MDD) which uses the multiples in the full recordings to compensate for missing illumination angles. This method only requires particle-velocity recordings at the surface from passive transient sources and retrieves body-wave reflection responses without free-surface multiples. We conduct an acoustic modelling experiment to compare this formulation to a previous MDD method and Green’s function retrieval by crosscorrelation for different source distributions. We find that in the case of noise-contaminated recordings obtained under severely limited and irregular illumination conditions, the alternative MDD method introduced here still retrieves the complete reflection response without free-surface multiples where the other interferometric methods break down.