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The community velocity model V.1.0 of southwest China, constructed from joint body- and surface-wave travel-time tomography

Liu Ying, Yao Huajian, Zhang Haijiang and Hongjian Fang
The community velocity model V.1.0 of southwest China, constructed from joint body- and surface-wave travel-time tomography
Seismological Research Letters (April 2021) 92 (5): 2972-2987

Abstract

Southwest China, located at the southeastern margin of the Tibetan plateau, plays an important role for the plateau growth and its material extrusion. It has complicated tectonic environment and strong seismic activities including the 2008 Wenchuan great earthquake. Numerous geophysical studies have been conducted in southwest China. However, a community velocity model (CVM) in this region is still not available, which makes it difficult to have a consistent catalog of earthquake locations and focal mechanisms and a consistent velocity model for simulating strong ground motions and evaluating earthquake hazards. In this study, we aim at building a high-resolution CVM (both VP and VS) of the crust and uppermost mantle in southwest China along with earthquake locations by joint inversion of body- and surface-wave travel-time data. In total, we have assembled 386,958 P- and 372,662 S-wave first arrival times and nearly 8100 Rayleigh-wave dispersion curves in the period band of 5-50 s. A multigrid strategy is adopted in the joint inversion. A coarser horizontal grid interval of 0.5 degrees is first used and then a finer grid interval of 0.25 degrees is used with initial models interpolated from the coarser-grid inverted velocity models. The spatial resolution of both VP and VS models can reach up to 0.5 degrees horizontally and 10 km vertically according to the checkerboard tests. The comparisons of our inverted VP and VS models with those from other studies show general consistency in large-scale features. The inverted models are further validated by P-wave arrival times from active sources and Rayleigh-wave data. In general, our velocity models show two low-velocity zones in the middle-lower crust and a prominent high-velocity region in between them. Our new models have been served as the first version of the CVM in southwest China (SWChinaCVM-1.0) for future studies.


ISSN: 0895-0695
EISSN: 1938-2057
Serial Title: Seismological Research Letters
Serial Volume: 92
Serial Issue: 5
Title: The community velocity model V.1.0 of southwest China, constructed from joint body- and surface-wave travel-time tomography
Affiliation: University of Science and Technology of China, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Hefei, China
Pages: 2972-2987
Published: 20210421
Text Language: English
Publisher: Seismological Society of America, El Cerrito, CA, United States
References: 62
Accession Number: 2021-041883
Categories: Seismology
Document Type: Serial
Bibliographic Level: Analytic
Illustration Description: illus. incl. sketch maps
N20°00'00" - N53°00'00", E74°00'00" - E135°00'00"
Secondary Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, United States
Country of Publication: United States
Secondary Affiliation: GeoRef, Copyright 2022, American Geosciences Institute. Abstract, Copyright, Seismological Society of America. Reference includes data from GeoScienceWorld, Alexandria, VA, United States
Update Code: 202128

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