Shallow S-Wave Velocity Structures in the Western Coastal Plain of Taiwan

The western coastal plain of Taiwan borders the Western Foot hills, which is a fold-and-thrust zone and one of Taiwan's major seismic zones. Earth quakes from the Western Foot hills are a frequent cause of disaster in the western coastal plain. In this study, array measurements of microtremors were conducted at seven sites through out the western coastal plain. At each site, four arrays (S, M, L, and XL arrays) of different sizes were considered. The largest radius of each array ranged from 32 m to 1 km. The Maximum Likelihood Method of Frequency-Wavenumber (F-K) analyses was used to obtain phase velocity dispersion curves. After the inversion of the dispersion curves with the initial models decided by Genetic Algorithm (GA) searching, shallow S-wave velocity structures for the western coastal plain were estimated.