The impact of crustal scattering on body-wave reflection interferometry by crosscorrelation and multidimensional deconvolution

Previous studies indicate that scattering may pose a trade-off for the performance of seismic interferometry applications for retrieving body-wave reflections of a target reflector. While it has been demonstrated that a higher scattering strength of the overburden improves the Green’s function estimated by crosscorrelation seismic interferometry (SI), other theoretical and empirical studies showed that multiple scattering also gives rise to more artefacts. The implications of this trade-off are analysed in this numerical study for a lithospheric scenario with varying crustal scattering strength and passive illumination conditions. In this scenario, we apply SI by crosscorrelation to elastodynamic responses to double-couple sources to reconstruct virtual Moho primary reflections. We include multidimensional deconvolution (MDD) methods in the analysis to investigate whether scattering-induced artefacts affect MDD methods in a similar way as was shown for the crosscorrelation method. Our results show that there indeed exists a trade-off between the quality of the virtual primary reflection of the target that can be obtained by SI and the scattering strength of the overburden. Furthermore, we find that the full-field MDD method proves to be most resilient to the negative effects of multiple scattering for all illumination conditions and scattering strengths analysed.