Comprehensive Uncertainty Quantification for Rayleigh Wave Phase Velocity and Beamforming Source Location

Develop a comprehensive approach to quantify uncertainties in Rayleigh wave phase velocity and in beamforming-based seismic source location, enabling rigorous error propagation when using very-long-period surface waves to attribute sources and estimate parameters such as seiche amplitudes in fjord environments.

Background

Accurate attribution of the 10.88 mHz very-long-period seismic signal to a Dickson Fjord seiche requires reliable estimates of Rayleigh wave travel times and source locations derived via beamforming. The study computes a heterogeneous-Earth-model-based travel time of 348.97 s and validates it against an independent empirical alignment (~350 s) from numerical simulations, but emphasizes that travel-time errors directly affect inferred seiche amplitudes.

Despite this practical importance, the authors note that there is no comprehensive method to quantify uncertainties in Rayleigh wave phase velocities or in beamforming-based source localization. Consequently, they report only a lower-bound uncertainty based on the discrepancy between modeled and empirically inferred travel times, underscoring the need for a systematic uncertainty quantification framework.