Seismic Tomography of the Continental United States from a Joint Inversion of Surface Waves and Body Waves

We present a model of seismic velocity anomalies for the entire continental United States—coast to coast, surface to lower mantle—using a joint body wave-surface wave inversion. This technique (Zhang et al., 2014), performed on a global adaptively-spaced grid, exploits the good vertical resolution at shallow depths of surface wave data, and the sampling of the deep mantle by teleseismic body (P and S) waves. The resultant model has better resolution at all depths than either method alone, enabling evaluation of interactions between lithospheric and mantle processes. We utilize the depth-dependence of surface wave sensitivity kernels to express surface wave phase velocity data directly in terms of spatial velocity structure (Fang et al., 2015). The data used are Rayleigh wave phase velocities from earthquakes and ambient noise (Schaeffer and Lebedev, 2013; Ekström, 2014) and S phase travel times from USArray, measured at the Array National Facility (ANF). We include a suite of synthetic tests to verify the performance of the inversion and compare it to results from traditional tomographic methods. We also use P arrivals and the influence of Vp on Rayleigh wave propagation speed to generate a preliminary model of Vp variations, independent from but consistent with the Vs model. Our model corroborates the well-established pattern of slow anomalies in the western US, especially in the Basin and Range and Rio Grande Rift regions. New details emerge in the eastern US, thanks to increasing data from the region. A distinction is observed between widespread fast lithospheric anomalies, associated with stable cratonic material, and deeper fast features, associated with the remnants of the Farallon Plate. It has been proposed that these fragments, near the mantle transition zones, still affect mantle dynamics (Forte et al., 2007), so better resolution of these anomalies is an important advancement. In addition, slower velocities are observed beneath the Appalachians and the Mississippi Embayment, further supporting the hypothesis that the mantle beneath the eastern US is more active and heterogeneous than previously thought.