Development of two-dimensional ground models by combining geotechnical and geophysical data

Geotechnical and geophysical testing data are conventionally considered as separated information or combined based on deterministic methods in site investigation programs, which causes loss of information and introduces additional uncertainties. This study aims to reduce the uncertainties and costs in inhomogeneous soil profile characterization and geotechnical analysis by quantitatively integrating these data. The intrinsic collocated co-kriging method (ICCK) is utilized to integrate Multi-channel analysis surface wave (MASW) and CPT data. This research shows the potential of using the MASW data to explore the horizontal scale of fluctuation (SOF) of the cone tip resistance (qc) field which is very difficult to get using the conventional methods due to the limited CPTs. The Markov model is used to avoid the tedious modeling of the cross-covariance relationship in the ICCK method. A series of synthetic case studies show that the combined soil profile is in good agreement with the “true” qc field with significantly reduced uncertainties. Based on estimating the uncertainties, the optimal distance between CPTs is suggested to be 1–2 horizontal SOF. This framework is also applied to a real case in the Christchurch area, which involves integration of CPTs and MASW tests. Cross validation and edge detection methods are used to quantitatively compare the integration results, confirming that the proposed framework is fully applicable to field data and can provide realistic and reliable estimations of qc field.