The effect of near‐surface azimuthal anisotropy on a joint interpretation of seismic and electrical resistivity data

Abstract

In this paper, we study the anisotropic near surface with seismic refraction surveying and electrical resistivity tomography. We present a field data processing case study and show a significant dependence of the determined P-wave velocity and electrical resistivity on the acquisition line direction. We show that the anisotropy influences not only the determined velocities themselves, but also the estimated depths of the determined boundaries and can cause misinterpretation of the arrival time curves and lead to hidden layer issues. We justify our field data-processing results with ray modelling and synthetic data processing. As a result of our case study, we suggest a consistent direction of anisotropy for electrical resistivity and seismic surveying for the particular site in the Novosibirsk region.