A signal called noise: A brief history of modeling in seismic interferometry

Ambient seismic noise is widely used in imaging and monitoring. While the development of numerical models for ambient noise has started almost synchronously with observational developments, reproducing the observations still faces many challenges. For example, on regional and global scale, appropriately accounting for the propagation of surface waves through complex and often only approximately known geologic structure is difficult and computationally demanding, while sources have high spatio-temporal variability. In this seminar, I will provide a (subjective) overview of the developments in numerical modeling of ambient seismic noise, focusing in particular on cross-correlation waveforms as a tool for seismological inversion.  I will show applications to ambient seismic source inversion to Earth’s hum and the secondary microseism; as well as an application to global tomography based on cross-correlations of the Earth’s hum. With these in mind, I will discuss current challenges and directions for future work.