The determination of the best fitting and the extreme source models by a global inversion method

In this paper, a global inversion method is developed for seismic moment tensor inversion by using the body wave forms. The algorithm depends on neither the selection of starting model nor the forms of objective function and constraints. When the error function, measure of the difference between the observed and synthetic waveforms, is chosen as the objective function, the best fitting source model is found; when a certain combination in seismic moment tensor elements is selected as the objective function and the values of error function are constrained in a suitable bound, the extreme source models can be produced by minimizing or maximizing this combination. By changing the form of the combination of moment tensor elements, a variety of different source characteristics can be considered. Therefore the extreme solution provides an estimation of the uncertainty in the best fitting source model. The seismic waveform data was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this algorithm. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.