Adjoint Tomography of Taiwan Region: From Travel-Time Toward Waveform Inversion

Abstract:

The complicated tectonic environment such as Taiwan region can modulate the seismic waveform severely and hamper the discrimination and the utilization of later phases. Restricted to the use of only first arrivals of P- and S-wave, the travel-time tomographic models of Taiwan can simulate the seismic waveform barely to a frequency of 0.2 Hz to date. While it has been sufficient for long-period studies, e.g. source inversion, this frequency band is still far from the applications to the community and high-resolution studies. To achieve a higher-frequency simulation, more data and the considerations of off-path and finite-frequency effects are necessary. Based on the spectral-element and the adjoint method recently developed, we prepared 94 M_W 3.5-6.0 earthquakes with well-defined location and focal mechanism solutions from Real-Time Moment Tensor Monitoring System (RMT), and preformed an iterative gradient-based inversion employing waveform modeling and finite-frequency measurements of adjoint method. By which the 3-D sensitivity kernels are taken into account realistically and the full waveform information are naturally sought, without a need of any phase pick. A preliminary model m003 using 10-50 sec data was demonstrated and compared with previous travel-time models. The primary difference appears in the mountainous area, where the previous travel-time model may underestimate the S-wave speed in the upper crust, but overestimates in the lower crust.