Joint Inversion of Rayleigh Wave Phase Velocity, Particle Motion, and Teleseismic Body Wave Data for Sedimentary Structures

Abstract

Mapping seismic structures of sedimentary basins is of great importance to better evaluate energy resources and seismic hazards. In this study, we develop a joint Bayesian Monte Carlo nonlinear inversion method that utilizes the complementary nature of Rayleigh wave phase velocity, Rayleigh wave particle motion, and teleseismic P wave in responding to sedimentary structures. Synthetic tests demonstrate that our joint inversion can retrieve the input sedimentary models better than inversions with surface or body wave data alone. We apply our method to waveform data of two broadband stations inside the Songliao Basin in northeast China to invert for sedimentary structures beneath the two stations. We verify our results by successfully isolating the Moho P‐to‐S conversion from sediment reverberations in surface receiver functions with a wavefield‐downward‐continuation technique. We further demonstrate that we can extend our method to single‐station inversions by excluding the Rayleigh wave phase velocity in the inversion.

On The Efficiency of P‐Wave Coda Autocorrelation in Recovering Crustal Structure: Examples From Dense Arrays in the Eastern United States

“…Yang and Niu (2019) studied sedimentary structure of basins in China from frequency‐dependent P ‐wave particle motion. Li et al (2019) successfully isolated the Moho P ‐to‐ S conversion from sediment reverberations with a wavefield‐downward‐continuation technique. They reported a joint inversion that can retrieve the input sedimentary models.…”

“…Another recent study investigated sedimentary structure of basins in China from frequency dependent P ‐wave particle motion (Yang & Niu, 2019). Li et al (2019) reported a joint inversion of Rayleigh wave phase velocity, particle motion, and teleseismic body wave data for sedimentary structures.…”

3‐D Sedimentary Structures Beneath Southeastern Australia Constrained by Passive Seismic Array Data

“…where V obs (t) and H obs (t) represent observed vertical and radial waveforms of P and converted S wave recorded at a given station. Because the Green's functions of the shallow structure (h syn (t,m) and v syn (t,m)) are almost independent from epicentral distances (Li et al, 2019) in the distance range of 30°-90° and the convolution operator is linear, we stack the recorded teleseismic waveforms from different teleseismic events by aligning waveforms according to their maximum vertical amplitude in order to suppress the random noise and to reduce the number of event waveforms to be fitted. Before stacking, for each event, the vertical and radial records are first normalized by the maximum amplitude of the vertical components and the negative polarity is reverse to positive polarity.…”

“…A recent study by Li et al. (2019) demonstrates that jointly inverting teleseismic P‐coda waveforms, Rayleigh wave phase velocity and ellipticity can better constrain velocities and velocity discontinuities of sedimentary basins. In this study, we adopt the method developed by Li et al.…”

“…In this study, we adopt the method developed by Li et al. (2019) and use the passive seismic datasets recorded by the Wombat array to construct the upper crustal structure of southeast Australia. The 3‐D upper crustal Vs model is fundamental to improve the exploration of resources and also contribute to alleviating earthquake hazards in southeastern Australia.…”