Joint deconvolution of building and downhole seismic recordings: an application to three test cases

In this study, the joint deconvolution is applied to recordings of three test cases located in the cities of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Istanbul, Turkey, and Mexico City, Mexico. Each test case consists of a building equipped with sensors and a nearby borehole installation in order to investigate different cases of coupling (impedance contrasts) between the building and the soil by analyzing the wave propagation through the building-soil-layers, and hence resolving the soil–structure-interactions. The three installations considering different dynamic characteristics of buildings and soil, and thus, different building-soil couplings, are investigated. The seismic input (i.e., the part of the wave field containing only the up-going waves after removing all down-going waves) and the part of the wave field that is associated with the waves radiated back from the building are separated by using the constrained deconvolution. The energy being radiated back from the building to the soil has been estimated for the three test cases. The values obtained show that even at great depths (and therefore distances), the amount of wave field radiated back by the building to the soil is significant (e.g., for the Bishkek case, at 145 m depth, 10% of the estimated real input energy is expected to be emitted back from the building; for Istanbul at 50 m depth, the value is also 10–15% of the estimated real input energy while for Mexico City at 45 m depth, it is 25–65% of the estimated real input energy). Such results confirm the active role of buildings in shaping the wave field.