Detection of lowermost mantle heterogeneity using seismic migration of
diffracted S-waves
Abstract
The bottom of Earth’s mantle hosts strong seismic wave speed
heterogeneities, such as ultra-low velocity zones (ULVZs). ULVZ
heterogeneities are commonly detected via forward modeling of seismic
waveforms, which can include time-consuming waveform synthesis and
visual inspection. Furthermore, ULVZ imaging has been most commonly
carried out with waves that have limited global coverage. In this work,
we investigate the efficacy of the diffracted S (Sdiff) wavefield, which
has global coverage to map CMB heterogeneity. We implement a Kirchhoff
migration algorithm to objectively investigate the presence or absence
of postcursors to Sdiff due to ULVZ heterogeneity. The Kirchhoff
approach is efficient, taking less than one CPU-minute per earthquake
(for ~1000 receivers) for our implementation. Our approach
makes use of the expected moveout of ULVZ-born Sdiff post cursors as a
function of distance from great-circle path at the base of the mantle.
We investigate epicentral distances 95°, where Sdiff includes asymptotic
S and ScS up to diffraction. We test the algorithm using synthetic
waveforms calculated for models that include lowermost mantle wave speed
heterogeneity. These results demonstrate that the migration approach can
well resolve the location of heterogeneity structures in the azimuthal
direction, but is less accurate at constraining the along-great circle
path location in the absence of crossing ray paths. Lastly, our
real-data examples detect CMB heterogeneity that agrees with past ULVZ
work. Our algorithm provides a quantitative assessment of the magnitude
of the waveform anomalies and, therefore, how anomalous the structures
are that are producing them.