WUS256: An Adjoint Waveform Tomography Model of the Crust and Upper Mantle of the Western United States for Improved Waveform Simulations

Abstract

We report a new model (WUS256) of radially anisotropic seismic wavespeeds of the crust and upper mantle of the western United States (WUS) obtained from adjoint waveform tomography for the purpose of improving synthetic waveform fits to observed data. WUS256 is based on inversion of over 94,000 waveforms from 72 earthquakes recorded by nearly 3,400 stations. We started with the SPiRaL global model (Simmons et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggab277) and waveforms in the period band of 50–120 s. We followed a conservative multiscale inversion approach with eight stages and 256 total inversion iterations which enabled monotonic misfit reduction to 20-s minimum-period waves. WUS256 relied on time-frequency (TF) phase misfits and a trust region limited memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (L-BFGS) optimization. Hessian-vector products were used to qualitatively assess model resolution. Results indicate that WUS256 has good coverage of the continental regions to depths of about 150 km and is able to resolve features on lateral scales of about 200 km. We quantify waveform fits by the reduction in TF and normalized amplitude difference misfits between WUS256 and the SPiRaL starting model. WUS256 significantly improves waveform fits with misfit reduction (Formula presented.) 64% for both inversion and validation data sets compared to the SPiRaL starting model and shows even better fits compared to other models. Waveform fits illustrate that WUS256 reproduces body-waves, fundamental mode surface waves as well as late arriving dispersed and/or scattered short period surface waves. The improvement in waveform fit indicates that WUS256 can be used to reproduce path effects on regional complete waveforms and moment tensor inversions.