Abstract

The phase of both Love and Rayleigh waves can be very sensitive to errors in the source parameters. This unstable behavior of the phase depends on the source parameters and is frequency dependent. Fractional errors larger than 10^o in the phase measurements can arise when realistic errors in the source parameters are considered. When these phase measurements are interpreted as phase velocity, uncertainties up to 3% can occur when errors in the source parameters are considered. The frequency bands where the unstable behavior occurs can be found by calculating the partial derivative of the initial phase with respect to the various source parameters. We have tested this method on a Rayleigh wave data set and find a good correlation between outliers in the data set and large partial derivatives of the source parameters.

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