In this paper, we present a calculation of seismic scattering from irregular surface topography in the Born approximation. Based on US-wide topographic data, we investigate topographic scattering at specific sites to demonstrate its impact on Newtonian-noise estimation and subtraction for future gravitational-wave detectors. We find that topographic scattering at a comparatively flat site in Oregon would not pose any problems, whereas scattering at a second site in Montana leads to significant broadening of wave amplitudes in wavenumber space that would make Newtonian-noise subtraction very challenging. Therefore, it is shown that topographic scattering should be included as criterion in the site-selection process of future low-frequency gravitational-wave detectors.
@article{arxiv.1111.6319,
title = {Seismic topographic scattering in the context of GW detector site selection},
author = {Michael Coughlin and Jan Harms},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.6319},
year = {2015}
}