CMT Source Inversions for Massive Data Assimilation in Global Adjoint Tomography

Abstract:

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is a vital tool for probing the Earth’s interior and enhancing our knowledge of the underlying dynamical processes [e.g., Liu et al., 2012]. Using the adjoint tomography method, we have successfully obtained a first-generation global FWI model named M15 [Bozdag et al., 2015]. To achieve higher resolution of the emerging new structural features and to accommodate azimuthal anisotropy and anelasticity in the next-generation model, we expanded our database from 256 to 4,224 earthquakes. Previous studies have shown that ray-theory-based Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) inversion algorithms can produce systematic biases in earthquake source parameters due to tradeoffs with 3D crustal and mantle heterogeneity [e.g., Hjorleifsdottir et al., 2010]. To reduce these well-known tradeoffs, we performed CMT inversions in our current 3D global model before resuming the structural inversion with the expanded database.

Initial source parameters are selected from the global CMT database [Ekstrom et al., 2012], with moment magnitudes ranging from 5.5 to 7.0 and occurring between 1994 and 2015. Data from global and regional networks were retrieved from the IRIS DMC. Synthetic seismograms were generated based on the spectral-element-based seismic wave propagation solver (SPECFEM3D GLOBE) in model M15. We used a source inversion algorithm based on a waveform misfit function while allowing time shifts between data and synthetics to accommodate additional unmodeled 3D heterogeneity [Liu et al., 2004]. To accommodate the large number of earthquakes and time series (more than 10,000,000 records), we implemented a source inversion workflow based on the newly developed Adaptive Seismic Data Format (ASDF) [Krischer, Smith, et al., 2015] and ObsPy [Krischer et al., 2015]. In ASDF, each earthquake is associated with a single file, thereby eliminating I/O bottlenecks in the workflow and facilitating fast parallel processing. Our preliminary results indicate that errors in the elements of the moment tensor and source location are small on average, although source depths generally become 3–5 km shallower.