Reducing errors in seismic tomography: combined inversion for sources and structure

SUMMARY To perform seismic tomography, accurate determinations of event locations and focal mechanisms are required. These are usually obtained prior to tomographic inversion; often, little attention is paid to the earth model used for their determination. We show that an imprint of this model is found in the model recovered after tomographic inversion. To reduce this problem, it is important to recalculate earthquake source parameters as the inversion proceeds; synthetic tests suggest that this yields a better correspondence between recovered and true models. However, alternate source and structure inversions lead to a slow rate of convergence, and significant errors remain. We therefore propose combining source and structure inversion into a single inverse problem, and present an efficient algorithm to do this. We demonstrate that this reduces the number of iterations required to achieve a given accuracy; in our experiments, we observe a fourfold improvement on alternate inversions. We focus on full‐waveform inversions for both source and structure, although the methods presented are general and should be applicable to other techniques.