Introduction

This lesson creates some synthetic seismograms by surface wave model superposition. The user is request to determine the group velocities through the use of the interactive program do_mft. The observed dispersion is then inverted to determine the velocity new velocity model which is then compared to the original model.

I create the directory LessonA  and place the scripts  DOIT,  and DOCLEAN in that directory.

For testing everything is in the tarball  LessonA.tgz . Unpack this with the command gunzip -c LessonA.tgz | tar xvf -    This will create the directory LessonA and place the file 00README and the scripts DOIT and DOCLEAN in that directory.

DOIT

When you run this script, surface-modal superposition is used to create a synthetic seismogram at a distance of 2500 km for a source with a depth of 10 km and with a faulting model of strike=45, rake=45 and dip=45. For this source depth and mechanism, the Rayleigh wave signal is simple in that the fundamental model spectrum is smooth.

Group Velocity Analysis

After the synthetics are computed the program do_mft is started using the command

        > do_mft *.sac
You will see the following graphical menu:

Now first select the vertical trace, B00101Z00.sac. Since this is the vertical, you will determine the Rayleigh wave group velocity. The next page tells you a lot about the trace and requires you to define the units.  Click on "Units" and select cm/s from the menu.  When you are done, click on the "Do MFT" button to go to the next page.



On this page click on the "Type" button to define "Rayleigh"  You can also change the filter parameter "Alpha" or the plotting parameters with the other buttons. When you are done, click on the "Do MFT" button.  At this point the FORTRAN program sacmft96 is executed to create the dispersion information.


When sacmft96 is done, you will be presented with a graphical menu. Group velocity analysis consists of narrow bandpass filtering the trace, and then finding the ten largest values of the envelope. The objective of this page is to permit you to visually edit those values to define the dispersion curve.

Clicking on the "Auto" button will ask you to define the mode, here Fundamental. Auto means that clicking on the dispersion window will initiate a "rubber band" for selecting the dispersion. A second mouse click will select the dispersion values nearest the rubber band line.  When you are done, click on "Exit" and then select "Yes" to save the dispersion values.



Now process the radial component and the transverse component, remembering to denote the dispersion on the transverse component as "Love". Here is the Love wave dispersion selected. Note that I also clicked on "Mode" and then continued selecting values to define the first higher mode dispersion.

Comparison with Theory

The shell script now compares the selected dispersion to the theoretical dispersion for the model. This is a very useful exercise since we can learn something about the imperfections of the multiple filter analysis used to get the group velocities:

We see that the group velocities are well determined at shorter periods, but that there are problems with the Rayleigh wave dispersion at longer periods. This may be a problem in the synthetics, or a problem in the choice of the filter parameter "Alpha" used, here a value of 50.

Structure Inversion

The dispersion data are now used to invert for a velocity structure. To emphasize the lack of uniqueness in the surface-wave inversion, the initial model is a layered halfspace. This unbiased upper mantle model is used since we expect crustal velocities to be lower. A smoothing operator in the inversion will preclude the determination of a sharp Moho. If we had started with a constant velocity model with crustal velocities, then the inversion would lead to an unrealistically low velocity zone in the mantle, because of the limited surface-wave resolution at those depths.

The surface-wave inversion is run iteratively until the solution has converged sufficiently (sufficiently is an imprecise term, but it is the user's choice as to the meaning of a good fit). The starting model (blue) and inverted model (red) are indicated as well as the observed and theoretical dispersion. This is a good least squares fit since.



We can also plot the resolution kernels for the inversion. Except for the deepest depths, the model is resolved, although the kernels suggest that the layering was too thin because the kernels are wider than the layer thicknesses.

After the inversion is completed, we have several velocity model files available: simple.mod - the true model used to create the synthetics and modl.out - the output of the inversion.  I can compare these models using the command

shwmod96 -LEG -K -1 simple.mod modl.out

which creates the graphics file SHWMOD96.PLT . I convert this to encapsulated PostScript and Portable Network Graphics using the commands

plotnps -F7 -W10 -EPS -K < SHWMOD96.PLT > shwmod96.eps
convert -trim shwmod96.eps shwmod96.png

Here the program convert is part of the ImageMagick package on LINUX/CYGWIN.  You will see that our dispersion define the upper crust well, but the dispersion data were not able to define the sharp Moho discontinuity of the true model because of limited resolution and also the model smoothing used for the inversion.

Cleanup

After you are done testing these programs, enter DOCLEAN to clean up the directory. You will be left only with the 00README, DOIT and DOCLEAN files.

Other Tests

Modify the script so that the source depth is 30 km, the faulting mechanism has strike 9, dip 90 and rake 0.  Then run the script. In this case you will notice that the Rayleigh wave signal on the vertical and radial components has a spectral hole. This lack of a smooth spectrum makes the dispersion hard to follow near the period of the spectral. You can experiment when running do_mft by changing the filter parameter alpha - a smaller value provides more timing resolution at the expense of frequency resolution.

You might also start the inversion program with another model, instead of the uniform halfspace used here.