Regional 3-D heterogeneities by waveform inversion – application to the Atlantic area

The waveform inversion method described in Woodhouse & Dziewonski (1984) was modified to retrieve regional scale 3-D heterogeneities by using the minor arc part of seismograms. The lateral heterogeneities are expanded horizontally into blocks (10°× 10°) and radially into Legendre polynomials up to order 3 (0–670 km), and thus the results show much fine details of lateral variation than previous global scale studies. We assumed that the heterogeneities produce the perturbation of eigenfrequencies which are the minor arc average of local eigenfrequency shift. We applied the method to the upper mantle beneath the Atlantic Ocean and its environments. Care was taken about the weighting of the data set. We found that the fit of each seismogram became better when the weighting of each seismogram is proportional to the inverse of initial data residuals. Resolution is good in the triangular region surrounded by South America, Europe, and North America. Resolution is not good in the South Atlantic because of the poor path coverage. Depth resolution is not clear, because of the use of Legendre polynomials, though the results suggest a broad half-width of the order of 200 km or more. We found some similarities between previous global studies and our results. For example, low velocities beneath the East Pacific Rise, Chile Rise and Azores triple junction and a high velocity Canadian shield are obtained. However, there are also differences; the high-velocity zone beneath the Brazilian shield at shallow depth is not a prominent feature in this study. Instead, we found a somewhat unexpected feature near the Romanche and Vema fracture zones where shallow positive anomalies exist. Smoothed results calculated by the spherical harmonic expansion are also shown for the purpose of comparison with global studies.