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Adjoint-Based Synthetic Inversions for Recovering 3D Anisotropic Structures

Description: 

Laboratory measurements confirm the presence of complex (low-symmetry) elasticity in a wide range of minerals. The presence of anisotropy in the uppermost mantle is well established. In subduction settings, anisotropy is complex, with different elements—the subducting plate, the mantle wedge, and the crust—potentially having different forms of anisotropy. Seismic imaging problems have non-unique solutions, and the addition of parameters due to the consideration of anisotropy makes the problem even more challenging. Seismic inversion techniques can be tested with the help of synthetic tests, whereby a synthetic target model is used to generate synthetic observed data, for a given source station geometry, which in turn is used to test the recovery of the target model using the technique in consideration. For this, we set up target model blocks, each with a central sub-block of homogenous anisotropy, while the remainder of the model block is homogeneous isotropic. The source station geometry is designed such that we have good, yet feasibly realistic, coverage of the medium. We test several factors that influence the retrieved model: different anisotropic symmetry classes, the source-station coverage, and added noise in the synthetic data. Our study prepares us for realistic synthetic inversions for complex anisotropic structures, which, in turn, will guide efforts for performing adjoint tomography in the Alaska subduction zone.

Session: Numerical Modeling in Seismology: Developments and Applications [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/20/2023

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Aakash Gupta

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: 

Authors