Crustal seismic structure of Tohoku region, Japan constrained by ambient noises

We present 3D crustal models of Vs and Vs azimuthal anisotropy of Tohoku region, Japan. We construct the models by using short to intermediate periods of Rayleigh waves retreated from noise interferometry and a wavelet-based multi-scale inversion technique. We employ the Welch's method to derive the empirical Green's functions (EGF) of Rayleigh waves from one year of continuous records of 123 short-period stations of the dense high-sensitivity seismograph network (Hi-net), operated by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED). We compute EGFs for about 4000 station pairs with interstation distance less than 300 km. For each qualified EGF, we measure the dispersion in the period range from 2 to 18 seconds. While our results are still at the preliminary stage, we have noticed few interesting features in the models: (1) the quasi-N-S trend volcano front seems to be a major boundary for the variations of both velocity and anisotropy, with the eastern part characterized by higher Vs and the western part by low Vs anomalies, consistent with their corresponding surface geology; (2) patterns of the Vs azimuthal anisotropy demonstrate a clear depth-dependent variation, with fast polarization direction (FPD) parallels the strike of the island at the shallow crust; at the larger depths, the FPD gradually rotates to the direction of absolute plate motion in the SW region, and is getting complicated in the NW region, respectively. We present the revealed depth-dependent anisotropy and discuss the tectonic implications of our models. Key words: Tohoku, ambient noise, seismic anisotropy, surface wave tomography

We present 3D crustal models of Vs and Vs azimuthal anisotropy of Tohoku region, Japan. We construct the models by using short to intermediate periods of Rayleigh waves retreated from noise interferometry and a wavelet-based multi-scale inversion technique. We employ the Welch's method to derive the empirical Green's functions (EGF) of Rayleigh waves from one year of continuous records of 123 short-period stations of the dense high-sensitivity seismograph network (Hi-net), operated by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED). We compute EGFs for about 4000 station pairs with interstation distance less than 300 km. For each qualified EGF, we measure the dispersion in the period range from 2 to 18 seconds. While our results are still at the preliminary stage, we have noticed few interesting features in the models: (1) the quasi-N-S trend volcano front seems to be a major boundary for the variations of both velocity and anisotropy, with the eastern part characterized by higher Vs and the western part by low Vs anomalies, consistent with their corresponding surface geology; (2) patterns of the Vs azimuthal anisotropy demonstrate a clear depth-dependent variation, with fast polarization direction (FPD) parallels the strike of the island at the shallow crust; at the larger depths, the FPD gradually rotates to the direction of absolute plate motion in the SW region, and is getting complicated in the NW region, respectively. We present the revealed depth-dependent anisotropy and discuss the tectonic implications of our models. Key words: Tohoku, ambient noise, seismic anisotropy, surface wave tomography