Upper Mantle Imaging with Array Recordings of Converted and Scattered Teleseismic Waves

Abstract

This paper provides a review of array-based imaging techniques that use converted and scattered teleseismic waves. It addresses various aspects of the imaging process, from the preprocessing of the data to the application of the imaging algorithms. The reviewed techniques form a continuum with respect to the level of complexity adopted in the treatment of the scattering problem. On one end of the spectrum, images may be produced by simple stacking of normalized P-to-S conversion records (i.e., receiver functions), which are binned according to station or common conversion points (CCP) and mapped to depth. Finer resolution can be achieved through the stacking of singly scattered wavefields along diffraction hyperbolae to recover relative scattering intensity/potential at individual points through a 2-D or 3-D model space. Moving to higher levels of complexity, we find methods that involve inversion/backprojection of scattered teleseismic wavefield to recover estimates of localized material property perturbations with respect to an a priori background model.

Seismic imaging of subducting continental lower crust beneath the Pamir

“…The receiver function (RF) method is a widely used seismological tool to image crustal and upper mantle seismic discontinuities underneath seismic stations (Kind et al, 2012;Rondenay, 2009;Bostock, 2007). This technique identifies the discontinuities, e.g.…”

The Pyrenean architecture as revealed by teleseismic P-to-S converted waves recorded along two dense transects

“…This bias increases with the dip angle, and usually leads to underestimate the dip of the inclined interface (Schneider et al 2013). These artefacts are expected to be strongly attenuated in 3-D Kirchhoff migration (Bostock et al 2001;Rondenay 2009), but it is likely that using more sophisticated migration techniques would not change the results of migration to the point of revising the structural interpretation. As already pointed out, the next progresses will come from very finely resolved tomographic images of both P and S velocities.…”

Element-by-element parallel spectral-element methods for 3-D teleseismic wave modeling

“…Teleseismic waves provide tremendous amounts of information for the detection of crustal and upper mantle structures (Rondenay, 2009). Over the past forty years, many techniques have been developed to analyze teleseismic wave datasets, including receiver function analysis (Langston, 1977;Kind et al, 2012), teleseismic wave travel-time tomography based on ray theory (Zhang et al, 2011), teleseismic migration (Shragge et al, 2006), and teleseismic scattering tomography (Roecker et al, 2010;Tong et al, 2014a).…”

“…The 2-D/3-D responses to the heterogeneity inside the reduced model contribute to the coda waves of the teleseismic phases, and the 2-D/3-D effects outside the model are neglected. This assumption of a 1-D background layered Earth model is similar to that in receiver function analysis and is often effective for a station that is sufficiently far from the source (Langston, 1977;Rondenay, 2009).…”