Virginia Tech Global Seismological Lab

3056A Derring Hall (Mail Code 0420)
Department of Geosciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061

Receiver Function Studies of Mantle Discontinuities

Teleseismic P wave gives rise to converted S waves at significant velocity discontinuities in the Earth, which travel slower than the P wave and arrive later in the P-wave coda. Those P-to-S converted phases provide constraints upon seismic interfaces and heterogeneities in the lithosphere. We showed that time-domain deconvolution based on singular value decomposi- tion works better than frequency-domain deconvolution as the problem is often ill-posed and requires regularization. Our experiments based on USArray data show that event stacking and Common Con- version Point (CCP) stacking, which have been widely used to enhance coherent signals from mantle discontinuities, do not average out differences introduced by different deconvolution techniques.

Migrated receiver function stacks at station H15A (-112.644, 44.6173) using TDD, FDD and MT-FDD (3 2.5-pi tapers). Each trace is obtained by stacking migrated receiver functions for all available events when the station is in operation.

Array Analysis and Crustal Receiver Functions

References

Xiaofeng Zhang and Ying Zhou (2011). "Deconvolution Techniques in Receiver Function Imaging of Mantle Discontinuities Beneath the Western United States", AGU Fall 2011.

Ying Zhou and Robert A. Phinney. "Crustal structure from teleseismic converted phases observed at a short-period array in Panamint Range, California", in prep.

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Ying Zhou June 2012