Radiation patterns: Possibility for monitoring seismic sources

Recent field measurements of the radiation in boreholes indicate that the radiation patterns of real seismic sources are not always in agreement with those corresponding to the point‐source excitation in unbounded homogeneous and isotropic acoustic or elastic media [we refer the reader to Aki and Richards (1980) for the basic discussion on the radiation patterns in homogeneous media]. This mismatch results from the fact that the point‐source radiation patterns corresponding to homogeneous media are too simplistic to satisfy any experiment in the more realistic Earth environment. A study of radiation patterns is certainly important not only to predict possible seismic events but also to analyze the source performance itself by recording seismic arrivals.