ALBERT

Description: SUMMARY Small-scale heterogeneities in the Earth’s mantle, the origin of which is likely compositional anomalies, can provide critical clues on the evolution of mantle convection. Seismological investigation of such small-scale heterogeneities can be facilitated by forward modelling of elastic wave scattering at high frequencies, but doing so with conventional 3-D numerical methods has been computationally prohibitive. We develop an efficient approach for computing high-frequency synthetic wavefields originating from small-scale mantle heterogeneities. Our approach delivers the exact elastodynamic wavefield and does not restrict the geometry or physical properties of the local heterogeneity and the background medium. It combines the technique of wavefield injection and a numerical method called AxiSEM3D. Wavefield injection can decompose the total wavefield into an incident and a scattered part. Both these two parts naturally have low azimuthal complexity and can thus be solved efficiently using AxiSEM3D under two different coordinate systems. With modern high-performance computing (on an order of magnitude of 105 CPU-hr), we have achieved a 1 Hz dominant frequency for global-scale problems with strong deep Earth scattering. Compared with previous global injection approaches, ours allows for a 3-D background medium and yields the exact solution without ignoring any higher-order scattering by the background medium. Technically, we develop a traction-free scheme for realizing wavefield injection in a spectral element method, which brings in several flexibilities and simplifies the implementation by avoiding stress or traction computation on the injection boundary. For a spherical heterogeneity in the mid-lower mantle, we compare the 3-D full-wave solution with two approximate ones obtained, respectively, by the perturbation theory and in-plane (axisymmetric) modelling. As a comprehensive application, we study S-wave scattering by a 3-D ultra-low velocity zone, incorporating 3-D crustal structures on the receiver side as part of the background model.

Description: Summary We develop and apply a method to constrain the space- and frequency-dependent location of ambient noise sources. This is based on ambient noise cross-correlation inversion using numerical wavefield simulations, which honour 3-D crustal and mantle structure, ocean loading, and finite-frequency effects. In the frequency range from 3 - 20 mHz, our results constrain the global source distribution of the Earth’s hum, averaged over the southern hemisphere winter season of 9 years. During southern-hemisphere winter, the dominant sources are largely confined to the southern hemisphere, the most prominent exception being the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc, which is the most active source region between 12 - 20 mHz. Generally, strong hum sources seem to be associated with either coastlines or bathymetric highs. In contrast, deep ocean basins are devoid of hum sources. While being based on the relatively small number of STS-1 broadband stations that have been recording continuously from 2004 - 2013, our results demonstrate the practical feasibility of a frequency-dependent noise source inversion that accounts for the complexities of 3-D wave propagation. It may thereby improve full-waveform ambient noise inversions and our understanding of the physics of noise generation.