Seismic wave-speed structure beneath the metropolitan area of Japan based on adjoint tomography

Abstract:

We have obtained a three-dimensional (3D) model of seismic wave-speed structure beneath the metropolitan area of Japan. We applied the spectral-element method (e.g. Komatitsch and Tromp 1999) and adjoint method (Liu and Tromp 2006) to the broadband seismograms in order to infer the 3D model. We used the travel-time tomography result (Matsubara and Obara 2011) as an initial 3D model and used broadband waveforms recorded at the NIED F-net stations. We selected 147 earthquakes with magnitude of larger than 4.5 from the F-net earthquake catalog and used their bandpass filtered seismograms between 5 and 20 second with a high S/N ratio. The 3D model used for the forward and adjoint simulations is represented as a region of approximately 500 by 450 km in horizontal and 120 km in depth. Minimum period of theoretical waveforms was 4.35 second. For the adjoint inversion, we picked up the windows of the body waves from the observed and theoretical seismograms. We used SPECFEM3D_Cartesian code (e.g. Peter et al. 2011) for the forward and adjoint simulations, and their simulations were implemented by K-computer in RIKEN. Each iteration required about 0.1 million CPU hours at least. The model parameters of Vp and Vs were updated by using the steepest descent method. We obtained the fourth iterative model (M04), which reproduced observed waveforms better than the initial model. The shear wave-speed of M04 was significantly smaller than the initial model at any depth. The model of compressional wave-speed was not improved by inversion because of small alpha kernel values. Acknowledgements: This research was partly supported by MEXT Strategic Program for Innovative Research. We thank to the NIED for providing seismological data.