Measuring and modelling seismic surface-wave dispersion variations in various hydrogeological contexts

Pressure (P) or shear (S)-wave velocity models of the near-surface can be simultaneously estimated along coincident arrays from P-wave refraction tomography and surface-wave (SW) dispersion inversion methods. Over the past decade, this approach has been integrated into the hydrogeophysics toolbox to image spatial variations of VP/VS (or Poisson) ratio, as its evolution is strongly associated with water content (or saturation) contrasts. The relevance of this method has been verified in various Critical Zone (CZ) observatories, each with distinct hydrogeological characteristics such as continuous multi-layered hydrosystems or fractured environments with strong discontinuities. It has also proven successful in other contexts and application scales, including a hydrothermal site or partially saturated glass beads in a laboratory experiment. However, we identified two major issues: (1) the combined use of P-wave traveltime tomography and SW dispersion inversion involves distinct characteristics of the wavefield and different assumptions about the medium, providing VP and VS models with different sensitivity, resolution, investigation depth, and posterior uncertainties; (2) the involved inversion processes use a small number of layers that cannot properly describe the continuous variations of subsurface hydrological properties. In particular, we noted that VP/VS (or Poisson) ratio was only consistent with strong saturation contrasts and often faced difficulties in retrieving water content variations in the unsaturated zone. This underscores the need to use petrophysical approaches to build alternative forward models and improve inversion processes. Adapted rock physics models have thus recently been developed to take capillary suction effects into account in the effective stress of the soil. In this study, we first present several datasets obtained from various contexts in which SW dispersion variations have been observed and related to changes in water content and/or water table depths. We then suggest using the previously cited rock physics models to simulate these data and show how it helps in understanding the involved hydrofacieses and processes. We finally address the relevance of surface-wave dispersion inversion approaches involving such forward models and discuss the possible use of additional attributes of the seismic wavefield to constrain interpretations.