Multimode 3‐D Kirchhoff Migration of Receiver Functions at Continental Scale

In geology, and in particular in geophysics, direct and indirect observations of processes occurring both at the surface of the Earth and at depth are used to understand the structure and dynamics of the Earth. For instance, seismic waves generated by large earthquakes can be used to study the structure of heterogeneities in the first few hundred kilometers inside the Earth. In this work, we use the scattered wavefield, which corresponds to energy arriving after the incident wavefield, to image the Earth. By nature, the scattered waves are linked to the scattering heterogeneities encountered along their propagation path, i.e. the fine scale structure of the Earth. Hence, the scattered wavefield has the ability to highlight structures where rapid velocity variations would otherwise be smoothed out by tomographic regularization, such as the structure of subducting slabs. To extract the information from the scattered wavefield, we resort to receiver function (RF) analysis and pre-stack depth migration. Standard migration procedures either rely on the assumption that underlying discontinuities are horizontal, such as in Common Conversion Point stacking (CCP), or are computationally expensive and usually limited to 2D geometries, such as in Reverse Time Migration (RTM) or Generalized Radon Transform (GRT). Here, we develop a Kirchhoff-type teleseismic imaging method that uses fast 3D travel-time calculations with minimal assumptions about the underlying structure. This provides high computational efficiency without limiting the problem to 1D or 2D geometries. In our method, we apply elastic Kirchhoff migration to transmitted and reflected teleseismic waves (i.e., RF). The approach expands on the work of Cheng et al. (2016). The 3D elastic Kirchhoff migration is adapted to the passive seismology scattering geometry and to account for free surface multiples. We use an Eikonal solver based on the fast marching method (FMM) to compute travel times for all scattered phases. 3D scattering patterns are computed to correct the amplitudes and polarities of the three component input signals. We consider three different stacking methods (linear, phase weighted and 2 nd root) to enhance the structures that are most coherent across scattering modes. To showcase the efficiency and accuracy of our migration procedure, we test it by conducting a series of synthetic tests in both artificially challenging and realistic scenarios. Results from synthetic tests show that our imaging principle can recover scattering structures accurately with minimal artifacts. We show that integrating the three components of the RF into the imaging principle allows to coherently retrieve the scattering potential for arbitrarily dipping discontinuities from all back-azimuths, and are able to retrieve a typical 2.5D subduction zone structure. We apply this novel 3D multi-mode Kirchhoff migration method to two different subduction zones, in Western Greece and Southern Alaska