Ambient Seismic Source Inversion in a Heterogeneous Earth: Theory and Application to the Earth's Hum ...

The sources of ambient seismic noise are extensively studied both to better understand their influence on ambient noise tomography and related techniques, and to infer constraints on their excitation mechanisms. Here we develop a gradient-based inversion method to infer the space-dependent and time-...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ermert, Laura, Sager, Korbinian, Afanasiev, Michael, Boehm, Christian, Fichtner, Andreas
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: ETH Zurich 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000225762
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/240647
Description
Summary:The sources of ambient seismic noise are extensively studied both to better understand their influence on ambient noise tomography and related techniques, and to infer constraints on their excitation mechanisms. Here we develop a gradient-based inversion method to infer the space-dependent and time-varying source power spectral density of the Earth's hum from cross correlations of continuous seismic data. The precomputation of wavefields using spectral elements allows us to account for both finite-frequency sensitivity and for three-dimensional Earth structure. Although similar methods have been proposed previously, they have not yet been applied to data to the best of our knowledge. We apply this method to image the seasonally varying sources of Earth's hum during North and South Hemisphere winter. The resulting models suggest that hum sources are localized, persistent features that occur at Pacific coasts or shelves and in the North Atlantic during North Hemisphere winter, as well as South Pacific coasts ... : Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 122 (11) ...