Towards an Anisotropic Whole Mantle 3D Elastic Velocity Model

Many studies have documented the existence of anisotropy in the earth's upper mantle, concentrated in the top 200 km. This evidence comes from the study of surface waves as well as shear wave splitting. There is also evidence for shear wave splitting in D", at least in well sampled regions. There are some hints of anisotropy at the base of the transition zone. Tomographic models of the upper mantle have been developed with simplifying assumptions about the nature of the anisotropy, in order to minimize the number of free parameters in the inversions. Some assume transverse isotropy (e.g Ekström and Dziewonski, 1997), others include additional degrees of freedom with some realistic constraints on mineralogy (e.g. Montagner and Tanimoto, 1991). Our goal is to investigate anisotropy in the whole mantle, using the framework of waveform inversion, and the nonlinear asymptotic mode coupling theory (NACT), previously developed and applied to the construction of whole-mantle SH velocity models (Li and Romanowicz, 1996; Mégnin and Romanowicz, 2000). For this we require a 3 component dataset, and we have extended our automatic transverse (T) component wavepicking procedures to the vertical (Z) and longitudinal (L) component - a non-trivial task given the large number of phases present in the coupled P-SV system. A useful initial assumption, for which the theory has been readily adapted, is that of transverse isotropy. As a first step towards this, we have been investigating inversions using T component and Z,L component data separately. In particular, this allows us to explore the sampling that can be achieved with Z,L component data alone in the deepest part of the mantle. Indeed, D" is in general much better sampled in SH than in SV, owing to the availability of SHdiff at large distances, while SVdiff decays more rapidly due to mantle-core coupling. We present the results of our resolution experiments and discuss the differences between the 3D SV model obtained in well resolved regions, and our previously derived SH models. We also present preliminary results on the potential of resolving anisotropy globally in the deep mantle.