Models

Our research involves the development of models in a broad sense, including models of the Earth's interior, ice sheets, and seismic sources. Below you can find a collection of such models with download links.  

REVEAL: Global-scale full-waveform inversion model

REVEAL at 100 km depth
SV wave speed in REVEAL at 100 km depth. Perturbations relative to the lateral average.

We present REVEAL, a global-scale, transversely isotropic full-waveform inversion model. REVEAL builds upon the earlier construction of the long-wavelength Earth (LOWE) model by lowering the minimum period from 100 to 33 s and by more than doubling the number of included earthquakes to 2366. In the course of 305 quasi-Newton iterations, REVEAL assimilated a total of 6,005,727 unique three-component waveforms. The inversion method rests on the combination of a stochastic mini-batch optimization and wavefield-adapted spectral-element meshes. Although the former naturally exploits redundancies in the data set, the latter reduces the cost of wavefield simulations by reducing the effective dimension of the numerical mesh. As a consequence, the average cost of an iteration in this inversion is only around 0.62% of an iteration that uses the complete data set with a standard cubed-sphere-type mesh. We calculated 3D synthetic seismograms using a graphics processing unit-accelerated spectral-element wave propagation solver, accommodating the effects of anelasticity, topography, bathymetry, ocean loading, and ellipticity. For a diverse range of global wavepaths, REVEAL predicts complete three-component seismograms at 33 s period that have not been included in the inversion. This generalization to unseen data suggests applications of REVEAL in event location and characterization, as well as in ground-motion modeling.

Resources

  • Model as Salvus (spectral-element) mesh file (hdf5) plus xdmf file for ParaView: Download download (4 GB)
  • Model as netCDF file: Download download (400 MB)
  • Synthetic benchmark dataset: To enable an easy assessment of REVEAL's ability to explain observed 3-component seismograms, we provide a synthetic dataset computed with REVEAL for 22 selected, globally distributed earthquakes. It has been computed using Download Salvus (PDF, 6.3 MB) and can be accessed on external page Zenodo.

Publications

Download REVEAL: A global full-waveform inversion model (PDF, 21.5 MB) (Thrastarson et al., BSSA 2024)

Download Data-adaptive global full-waveform inversion (PDF, 22.8 MB) (Thrastarson et al., GJI 2022)

Download Accelerating numerical wave propagation by wavefield adapted meshes. Part II: full-waveform inversion (PDF, 11.6 MB) (Thrastarson et al., GJI 2020)

Download Accelerated full-waveform inversion using dynamic mini-batches (PDF, 4.6 MB) (van Herwaarden et al., GJI 2020)

FWI of the African Plate

Full seismic waveform inversion of the African plate
SV velocity variations at 70 km depth in the full seismic waveform inversion of the African plate.

This full seismic waveform inversion of the African Plate was constructed using the combination of spectral-element wavefield simulations, adjoint techniques and stochastic mini-batch optimisation. We performed 130 iterations and invert data from 397 unique earthquakes and 184,356 unique source-receiver pairs. The minimum period is 35 s. We clearly image tectonic features such as the Afar triple junction. Particularly interesting are the low-velocity zones below the Hoggar, Aïr, and Tibesti Mountains, pronounced more than in earlier works. Finally, we introduce a new strategy to assess model uncertainty. We deliberately perturb the final model, perform additional mini-batch iterations, and compare the result with the original final model. This test uses actual seismic data instead of artificially generated synthetic data and requires no assumptions about the linearity of the inverse problem.

Resources

Publications

Long-wavelength Earth Model (LOWE)

LOWE
SV velocity structure at 100 km in the LOWE Model of Thrastarson et al. (2022). (Figure by Sölvi Thrastarson.)

The LOng-Wavelength Earth model (LOWE) is a whole-Earth model of radially anisotropic seismic structure. It has been constructed using full-waveform inversion with wavefield-adapted meshes. Working at periods between 100 - 200 s, it assimilates complete three-component seismic waveforms from 1179 earthquakes.

Resources

The model can be downloaded in two different formats:

Publications

Collaborative Seismic Earth Model

CSEM
Shear velocity at 15 km depth in the current Collaborative Seismic Earth Model.

The first-generation Collaborative Seismic Earth Model (CSEM) can be downloaded most easily from the website of the external page IRIS EMC. The second generation CSEM will become available soon.

Publications

EastGRIP Firn Model

S-wave speed near the EastGRIP camp.
S-wave speed as a function of depth near the EastGRIP camp, constrained by airplane landing data.

The external page EastGRIP firn model has been derived using Backus-Gilbert inversion of multi-mode dispersion data. These data have been recorded with a 3 km long DAS cable during the landing of a C-130 Hercules near the EastGRIP camp. Field work impressions including the airplane landing can be found on our external page YouTube Channel.

Resources

Publications

EastGRIP Ice Sheet Seismic Model

Enlarged view: Distributions of P and S wave speed within the Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet near the EastGRIP drill site.
Distributions of P and S wave speed within the Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet near the EastGRIP drill site.

The P and S wave speed model of the Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet near the external page EastGRIP drill site has been computed by nonlinear traveltime inversion of active-shot seismic data recorded within the EastGRIP borehole. For the recordings, we lowered a fibre-optic cable 1'500 m into the borehole and recorded strain rate using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). Field work impressions can be found on the Yexternal page ouTube channel of our group.

Resources

The active-shot seismic DAS data are freely available here.

The ensmble of acceptable P and S wave speed models can be found here.

Seismic ambient noise source maps

SANS
Daily maps of ambient noise source power-​spectral density in the oceans. (Figure by Jonas Igel.)

The Seismic Ambient Noise Source maps (SANS) are daily global models of the power-spectral density distribution of microseismic noise sources in the oceans. Using spectral-element wavefield simulations and asymmetry measurements on noise correlations, these maps are computed every day, thereby providing a snapshot of interactions between atmosphere, oceans and the solid Earth with high temporal and spatial resolution.

Resources

The noise source models can be downloaded from the SANS website.

Publications

Frequency-dependent hum sources

hum sources
Frequency-dependent power-spectral density of the sources of the Earth's hum.

The frequency-dependent hum source model provides the distribution of the power-spectral density distribution of forces at the Earth's surface that excite low-frequency ambient seismic noise.

Resources

The complete model in vtk format can be downloaded Download here.

Publications