Herein, we propose a method based on the existing second-order blind identification of underdetermined mixtures technique for identifying the modal characteristics-namely, natural frequencies, damping ratio, and real-valued partial mode shapes of all contributing modes-of structures with a limited number of sensors from recorded free/ ambient vibration data. In the second-order blind identification approach, second-order statistics of recorded signals are used to recover modal coordinates and mode shapes. Conventional versions of this approach require the number of sensors to be equal to or greater than the number of active modes. In the present study, we first employ a parallel factor technique to decompose the covariance tensor into rank-one tensors so that the partial mode shapes at the recording locations (sensors) can be estimated. The mode shape matrix identified in this manner is not square, which precludes the use of a simple inversion to extract the modal coordinates. As such, the natural frequencies are identified from the recovered modal coordinates' Autocovariances. The damping ratios are extracted using a least-squares technique from modal free vibrations, as they are not directly recoverable because of the inherent smearing produced by windowing processes. Finally, a Bayesian model updating approach is employed to complete the partial mode shapes-that is, to extract the mode shapes at the DOFs without sensors. We use simulated and physical data for verifying and validating this new identification method, and explore optimal sensor distribution in multistory structures for a given (limited) number of sensors. particular extraction method works without having the sources or the mixing processes-hence, the term blind-and employs second-order statistics of recorded response signals to recover the modal coordinate signals and the mode shape matrix. However, SOBI method does not work well in the presence of highly damped, low-energy or closely spaced modes, severe nonstationary excitations, and relatively large measurement noise. The issues of weakly nonstationary signals and noisy measurement were addressed in [20], whereas separability of low-energy modes was improved by employing stationary wavelet transform in [21]. Nevertheless, conventional versions of SOBI methods are limited to determined or overdetermined problems, in which the number of active modes is equal to or less than the number of recorded signals. For civil structures (e.g., tall buildings, long-span bridges, etc.), this constraint is often prohibitive.Various algorithms are presented in the signal processing literature for underdetermined problems, and in most such studies, the source signals (here, the modal coordinates) are assumed to be sparse [22,23]. Given this condition, time-frequency representations along with clustering techniques [24,25] or modal decompositions [26] are used to identify the source signals. Nevertheless, aforementioned methods are not suitable for modal identification of civil structures because their free or a...