Analysis of core-mantle boundary seismic waves using full\-waveform modelling and adjoint methods

TL;DR

This study employs spectral-element and adjoint methods to analyze seismic waves at the Earth's core-mantle boundary, assessing how topography and velocity variations influence seismic imaging and proposing improvements through full-waveform inversion.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of full-waveform modeling and adjoint methods to better understand CMB seismic interactions and evaluates the accuracy of ray theory versus full-waveform approaches.

Findings

Ray theory performs well with some accuracy loss.

Full-waveform inversion can improve CMB topography imaging.

Joint inversion of velocity variations and topography is necessary.

Abstract

Using spectral-element and adjoint methods, we investigate body waves interacting with the Earth's most dramatic interface, the core-mantle boundary (CMB). Intermediate-to-high frequency seismograms are computed incorporating topography models. We analyse the sensitivity of many seismic phases interacting with the interface. The study aims at showing effects of CMB structure on synthetics and highlights difficulties of imaging this region due to strong trade-off between velocity variations and topography. Synthetic waveforms computed at dominant periods of 6-18 seconds are used in order to observe time shifts due to topography and calculate the adjoint sensitivity kernel. We focus on diffracted, core reflected and refracted P and S waves. The sensitivity kernel depicts first Fresnel zones of these phases and others that may contribute to narrow time window, although unpredicted by ray theory. We perform comparisons between time shifts due to topography models made on full-waveform synthetics to ray theoretical predictions to assess methods usually deployed for imaging CMB. This shows that for most phases ray theory performs well enough with some accuracy loss. We propose that using relevant seismic phases simultaneously in full-waveform inversion may improve CMB topography imaging. However, it seems necessary to jointly invert for velocity variations due to D\" layer, which is so far poorly understood and presents a challenge when it comes to identifying its effects on traveltime data. In our further research, a FWI workflow is being developed and aims at addressing these issues.