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Upper Mantle Imaging with Array Recordings of Converted and Scattered Teleseismic Waves

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Abstract

This paper provides a review of array-based imaging techniques that use converted and scattered teleseismic waves. It addresses various aspects of the imaging process, from the preprocessing of the data to the application of the imaging algorithms. The reviewed techniques form a continuum with respect to the level of complexity adopted in the treatment of the scattering problem. On one end of the spectrum, images may be produced by simple stacking of normalized P-to-S conversion records (i.e., receiver functions), which are binned according to station or common conversion points (CCP) and mapped to depth. Finer resolution can be achieved through the stacking of singly scattered wavefields along diffraction hyperbolae to recover relative scattering intensity/potential at individual points through a 2-D or 3-D model space. Moving to higher levels of complexity, we find methods that involve inversion/backprojection of scattered teleseismic wavefield to recover estimates of localized material property perturbations with respect to an a priori background model.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Alan Levander and Xueqing Li for permission to use their figures and for providing electronic files of the originals; Karen Fischer, for insightful discussions on Sp receiver functions; Chuck Ammon, for input on the iterative time-domain deconvolution approach; and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, which helped improve the original manuscript.

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  1. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Stéphane Rondenay

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  1. Stéphane Rondenay
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Correspondence to Stéphane Rondenay.

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Rondenay, S. Upper Mantle Imaging with Array Recordings of Converted and Scattered Teleseismic Waves. Surv Geophys 30, 377–405 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10712-009-9071-5

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