Azimuthal anisotropy from eikonal tomography: example from ambient-noise measurements in the AlpArray network

Ambient-noise records from the AlpArray network are used to measure Rayleigh wave phase velocities between more than 150 000 station pairs. From these, azimuthally anisotropic phase-velocity maps are obtained by applying the eikonal tomography method. Several synthetic tests are shown to study the bias in the ψ2 anisotropy. There are two main groups of bias, the first one caused by interference between refracted/reflected waves and the appearance of secondary wave fronts that affect the phase traveltime measurements. This bias can be reduced if the amplitude field can be estimated correctly. Another source of error is related to the incomplete reconstruction of the traveltime field that is only sparsely sampled due to the receiver locations. Both types of bias scale with the magnitude of the velocity heterogeneities. Most affected by the spurious ψ2 anisotropy are areas inside and at the border of low-velocity zones. In the isotropic velocity distribution, most of the bias cancels out ...