Short-Period Surface-Wave Tomography in the Continental United States—A Resource for Research

Abstract

Abstract The variation of phase and group velocity dispersion of Love and Rayleigh waves was determined for the continental United States and adjacent Canada. By processing ambient noise from the broadband channels of the Transportable Array (TA) of USArray and several Program for the Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere experiments and using some earthquake recordings, the effort was focused on determining dispersion down to periods as short as 2 s. The relatively short distances between TA stations permitted the use of a 25 km×25 km grid for the four independent tomographic inversions (Love and Rayleigh and phase and group velocity). One reason for trying to obtain short-period dispersion was to have a data set capable of constraining upper crust velocity models for use in determining regional moment tensors. The benefit of focusing on short-period dispersion is apparent in the tomography maps—shallow geologic structures such as the Mid-Continent Rift, and the Michigan, Illinois, Anadarko, Arkoma, and Appalachian basins are imaged. In our processing, we noted that the phase velocities were more robustly determined than the group velocities. We also noted that the inability to obtain dispersion at short periods shows distinct regional patterns that may be related to the local upper crust structure.