Active source experiment (MASW)

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General overview

First introduced by Al-Husseini et al. (1981), Mari (1984), Gabriels et al. (1987), the Multichannel analysis of surface waves was popularized by Park et al. (1999). This technique relies on the recording along a 1D linear profile of seismic signals produced by a controlled source (hammer, vibrator, explosion, etc.) and analysis of surface wave dispersion properties after applying slant-stack or FK transform to the recorded seismic section. In the following tutorial, only the FK transform is used.

Getting ready

Exemple of a seismic section.


Description of the MASW toolbox

Overview of Masw toolbox

Open the MASW toolbox by pushing the following plugin icon MASWToolboxPluginIcon.png or, alternatively, by selecting Linear F-K for active experiments in Tools menu. Two windows should then open as displayed in the figure on the right: the Linear FK toolbox to set up processing parameters and a Linear fk results to display MASW results. The Linear FK toolbox is composed of four tabs:

  • Pre-processing tab is used to define the time window, the tapering, the amplitude normalization, etc.
  • Processing tab allows to define the processing scheme (FK or HRFK)
  • Output tab is used to set up the frequency and slowness band to be processed and the output filename
  • Time tab allows to select the time limits and part of the signals to be processed and the time window length;
  • Curves tab is used to save, remove or load dispersion curves that are picked


Parameters setting

MASW Parameters PREPROCESSING.png

In Pre-processing tab:

  • Select the minimum and maximum source-to-receiver distance which will be processed. This allows to exclude signals close to the source shot (this distance should be at least one wavelength in order to reduce near-field effects) or at large distances for which the signal-to-noise ratio may be low.
  • Select the time limits to be processed. A taper


  • HRFK (cross-link avec HRFK de Mathias)
  • normalize energy

FK Computing

  • computation for one single file and picking of the curve
  • alternatives : 1) create a stack file and then compute the FK; 2)compute FK for all shots and then stack the FK maps