Regularizing 3D teleseismic wavefield for receiver function imaging
using radial basis function
Abstract
Receiver function is important for imaging crustal and upper mantle
discontinuities. However, sparsely scattered stations would introduce
imaging artifacts or even lead to misinterpretation on complex
structures. We regularize 3D teleseismic wavefield to reduce the
artifacts using radial basis function interpolation. First, we evaluated
the feasibility of the wavefield regularization with several typical
models by synthetic data. The results demonstrate the high reliability
of our method on recovering local 2D and 3D structures, even when
seismic stations are intentionally missed 95% on a uniform fine grid.
Then, we applied this method to sparsely deployed stations in Northeast
China. The waveforms reconstructed from surrounding stations show good
consistency with the observed waveforms; furthermore, the imaging
results using the regularized data are highly comparable with the
reference results obtained by a dense 2D seismic array of 60 stations
(with a spacing of 10-17 km), even though our input data are mainly
contributed by only 9 stations (with an averaged spacing of 80 km). Our
results have better continuity of 3D topography of subsurface, compared
with that obtained by traditional method. Our regularization method
could significantly improve the spatial resolution of receiver function
imaging both for sparse and dense distribution of seismic stations,
especially for imaging relatively complex structures with lateral
variations.