Inverse Theory, Imaging Methods, & Community Tools

Making new discoveries about Earth's interior requires innovating methods to probe regions deep within the Earth that are otherwise inaccessible. Our group leverages multiple seismological datatypes to better image Earth structure.

Wave travel-time information is commonly used to produce models of seismic velocity, which are sensitive to temperature and composition, but an observed change in seismic velocity can be explained equally well by multiple physical mechanisms. Therefore, we leverage two additional types of wave measurements—seismic attenuation and seismic anisotropy—that are challenging to make but provide complementary constraints on temperature, viscosity, melt, grain size, volatile content, and the dynamics of the upper mantle. These parameters are crucial for understanding the scale and vigor of mantle convection and structure and evolution of the lithosphere-asthenosphere system.

Development of computational tools that are open and accessible to the community is a key part of what we do in our group. As a student in my group, you will learn how to write "good code" and how to share that code on common platforms like GitHub. These are important skills to have both for science and industry.

We use and publish a range of tools that accomplish important tasks including: ambient noise cross-correlations, surface wave dispersion measurements and inversion, seismic attenuation measurements, Rayleigh wave ellipticity meausrements, OBS locations, array beamforming, OBS noise removal, clock drift corrections, equilibrium phase calculations, and more.