Controls on Rayleigh wave amplitudes: attenuation and focusing

A large data set of amplitude measurements of minor and major arc Rayleigh waves in the period range 73–171 s is collected. By comparing these amplitudes with the amplitudes of synthetic waveforms calculated by mode summation, maps of lateral variations in the apparent attenuation structure of the Earth are constructed. An existing formalism for predicting the effects of focusing is employed to calculate amplitude perturbations for the same data set. These perturbations are used to construct 'pseudo‐attenuation' maps and these results are compared with the apparent attenuation maps calculated from the data. It is shown that variations in Rayleigh wave amplitude perturbations in the Earth are dominated by attenuation at long wavelengths (below about degree 8) and by elastic structure at shorter wavelengths. It is also shown that the linear approximation for focusing is successful at predicting Rayleigh wave amplitudes using existing phase velocity maps. These results indicate that future attempts to model the velocity structure of the Earth would be assisted by incorporating amplitude data and by jointly inverting for Q structure.