3-D multi-parameter type traveltime tomography in a spherical coordinate frame: comparison of double and triple class simultaneous inversions

It is now common practice to perform simultaneous traveltime inversion for the velocity field and the reflector geometry in reflection/refraction tomography, or the velocity field and the hypocenter locations in regional earthquake tomography, but seldom are all three classes of model parameters updated simultaneously. This is mainly due to the trade-off between the different types of model parameters and the lack of different seismic phases to constrain the model parameters. Using a spherical-coordinate ray tracing algorithm for first and later (primary reflected) arrival tracing algorithm in combination with a popular linearized inversion solver, it is possible to simultaneously recover the three classes of model parameters in regional or global tomographic studies. In this paper we incorporate the multistage irregular shortest-path ray tracing algorithm (in a spherical coordinate system) with a subspace inversion solver to formulate a simultaneous inversion algorithm for triple model parameters updating using direct and later arrival time information. Comparison tests for two sets of data (noise free and added noise) indicate that the new triple-class parameter inversion algorithm is capable of obtaining nearly the same results as the double-class parameter inversion scheme. Furthermore, the proposed multi-parameter type inversion method is not sensitive to a modest level of picking error in the traveltime data, and also performs well with a relatively large uncertainty in earthquake hypocentral locations. This shows it to be a feasible and promising approach in regional or global tomographic applications.