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

• Published in: Surveys in geophysics Vol. 30; no. 4-5; pp. 377 - 405
• Main Author: Rondenay, Stéphane
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2009; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Arrays; Astronomy; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Geophysics/Geodesy; Observations and Techniques; Scattering; Seismology; Surface waves; Upper mantle; Imaging lithosphere; Upper mantle; Receiver functions; Teleseismic; Migration
• ISSN: 0169-3298; 1573-0956
• DOI: 10.1007/s10712-009-9071-5

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.