A strongly heterogeneous hydrothermal area imaged by surface waves: The case of Solfatara, Campi Flegrei, Italy

We investigated the shallow structure of the Solfatara, a volcano within the Campi Flegrei caldera, southern Italy, using surface waves as a diagnostic tool. We analysed data collected during the RICEN campaign, where a 3-D active seismic experiment was performed on a dense regular grid of 90 m × 115 m using a Vibroseis as the seismic source. After removal of the source time function, we analysed the surface wave contribution to the Green's function. Here, a 1-D approximation can hold for subgrids of 40 m × 40 m. Moreover, we stacked all of the signals in the subgrid according to source-receiver distance bins, despite the absolute location of the source and the receiver, to reduce the small-scale variability in the data. We then analysed the resulting seismic sections in narrow frequency bands between 7 and 25 Hz. We obtained phase and group velocities from a grid search, and a cost function based on the spatial coherence of both the waveforms and their envelopes. We finally jointly inverted the dispersion curves of the phase and group velocities to retrieve a 1-D S-wave model local to the subgrid. Together, the models provided a 3-D description of the S-wave model in the area. We found that the maximum penetration depth is 15 m. In the first 4 m, we can associate the changes in the S-wave field to the temperature gradient, while at greater depths, the seismic images correlate with the resistivity maps, which indicate the water layer close to the Fangaia area and an abrupt variation moving towards the northeast.