Abstract
Geological interpretations, earthquake source inversions and ground
motion modelling, among other applications, require models that jointly
resolve crustal and mantle structure. With the second generation of the
Collaborative Seismic Earth Model (CSEM2), we present a global
multi-resolution tomographic Earth model that serves this purpose. The
model evolves through successive regional- and global-scale refinements.
While the first generation aggregated regional models, with this study,
we ensure consistency between all individual submodels, resulting in a
model that accurately explains wave propagation across scales. Recent
regional tomographic models were incorporated, comprising
continental-scale inversions for Asia and Africa, as well as regional
inversions for the Western US, Central Andes, Iran, and Southeast Asia.
Across all regional refinements, over 793,000 unique source-receiver
pairs contributed. Moreover, the long-wavelength Earth model (LOWE)
introduces large-scale structures outside of pre-existing local
refinements. A global full-waveform inversion over a total of 194
iterations with a minimum period of 50 s on a large data
set of 2,423 earthquakes and over 6 million source-receiver pairs
ensures that regional updates in the crust and uppermost mantle
correctly translate into updates of deeper, global-scale structure. To
test the performance of CSEM2, we evaluate waveform fits between
observed and synthetic seismograms at 50 s for an
independent data set on the global scale, and on the regional scale for
lower periods. We show that we can accurately simulate waveforms within
and across the regional refinements, maintaining the original resolution
of the submodels embedded in the global framework.