Improved Statistical Processing for Common Conversion Point Stacked Receiver Functions

The interpretation of teleseismic receiver functions is typically limited by poor constraints on the uncertainty of amplitudes of converted phases. In continental regions these problems are overcome by stacking large amounts of data. In oceanic regions, however, data quality is notoriously noisy and the number of events are limited by significantly shorter station deployment times. In order to obtain maximum value from a data set, it is necessary to have estimates of uncertainty. Here we combine a common-conversion point stacking technique with multiple-taper correlation RF estimates that allow frequency domain weighting. We then compute jackknife uncertainties to estimate local uncertainties in RF amplitude. We apply this technique to a continental station in Arabia (RAYN) as a benchmark, and also to the ocean island station at Raratonga, Cook Islands (RAR). The structure we recover matches previous crustal studies at both stations, and provides new interpretations of conversions in the upper mantle. At single stations, this technique works well to resolve crust and mantle structure up to a depth of 100 km. Geographical dispersion of raypaths at larger depths decreases the number of events per bin, and therefore increases the uncertainty in converted amplitude. We therefore propose that this method will be well suited to the analysis of data from seismic arrays.