Transmission to Reflection Transformation of Teleseismic Body Waves

In 1963, Claerbout demonstrated that the reflection response of a 1-D, acoustic, stratified medium bounded above by a free surface could be constructed from cross correlations of its transmission response. This result has been subsequently extended to both elastic and 3-D media, and holds potentially important implications for the processing of teleseismic body wavefield data. For example, transmisson-to-reflection transformation isolates each distinct single-scattering interaction to an individual component. It thereby obviates the issue of interfering, zeroth-order, free-surface multiples that plague interpretation of P-to- S conversions in classical receiver functions. Moreover, reflection-transformed teleseismic data could, in principle, be inverted using inverse scattering algorithms developed for seismic reflection applications. The demands on data are, however, significant. The 1-D elastic application requires impulse responses for both P and S sources at common slowness, and extension to multiple dimensions involves integrals over horizontal coordinates. In this presentation, we demonstrate 1-D application to data from station HYB and demonstrate the recovery of reflections from the continental Moho, using Green's function estimates for teleseismic P and SKS. We further discuss practical difficulties and evaluate potential for more general application.