Surface waves are widely used in near-surface geophysics and provide a non-invasive way to determine near-surface structures. By extracting and inverting dispersion curves to obtain local 1D S-wave velocity profiles, multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW) has been proven as an efficient way to analyze shallow-seismic surface waves. By directly inverting the observed waveforms, full-waveform inversion (FWI) provides another feasible way to use surface waves in reconstructing near-surface structures. This paper provides a state of the art on MASW and shallow-seismic FWI, and a comparison of both methods. A two-parameter numerical test is performed to analyze the nonlinearity of MASW and FWI, including the classical, the multiscale, the envelope-based, and the amplitude-spectrum-based FWI approaches. A checkerboard model is used to compare the resolution of MASW and FWI. These numerical examples show that classical FWI has the highest nonlinearity and resolution among these methods, while MASW has the lowest nonlinearity and resolution. The modified FWI approaches have an intermediate nonlinearity and resolution between classical FWI and MASW. These features suggest that a sequential application of MASW and FWI could provide an efficient hierarchical way to delineate near-surface structures. We apply the sequential-inversion strategy to two field data sets acquired in Olathe, Kansas, USA, and Rheinstetten, Germany, respectively. We build a 1D initial model by using MASW and then apply the multiscale FWI to the data. High-resolution 2D S-wave velocity images are obtained in both cases, whose reliabilities are proven by borehole data and a GPR profile, respectively. It demonstrates the effectiveness of combining MASW and FWI for high-resolution imaging of near-surface structures.

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High-frequency surface-wave techniques are widely used to estimate S-wave velocity of near-surface materials. Surface-wave methods based on inversions of dispersion curves are only suitable to laterally homogeneous or smoothly laterally varying heterogeneous earth models due to the layered-model assumption during calculation of dispersion curves. Waveform inversion directly fits the waveform of observed data, and it can be applied to any kinds of earth models. We have used the Love-wave waveform inversion in the time domain to estimate near-surface S-wave velocity. We used the finite-difference method as the forward modeling method. The source effect was removed by the deconvolution technique, which made our method independent of the source wavelet. We defined the difference between the deconvolved observed and calculated waveform as the misfit function. We divided the model into different sizes of blocks depending on the resolution of the Love waves, and we updated the S-wave velocity of each block via a conjugate gradient algorithm. We used two synthetic models to test the effectiveness of our method. A real-world case verified the validity of our method.

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