IGPP-0225
UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr.
La Jolla, CA 92093-0225
Email:
glaske@ucsd.edu
poster/oral: poster
| Radial mode eigenfrequencies are commonly thought to be measured with great ease and precision. The reason for this is that these modes have no geographic pattern so one should be able to measure frequencies from a spectrum observed at any station in the world. Yet, radial modes often seem inconsistent with spherical Earth models that fit all other mode frequencies. It turns out that radial modes are sometimes strongly coupled. The strongest coupling is predicted to be with l=2 modes which is caused by the Earth's hydrostatic ellipticity and aspherical structure of harmonic degree 2. In such cases, mode-coupling due to ellipticity alone can cause a frequency shift for the radial modes by more than 4 microHz. Given that mode frequencies can be measured to within 0.1 microHz, this shift is significant, and some singlets of l=2 modes have indeed been misidentified as the radial mode in the past. Including the spectra of the June 23, 2001 Southern Peru Earthquake we have re-analyzed radial mode eigenfrequencies and present a mode dataset that is internally more consistent than previous ones. We construct spherical Earth models that are consistent with our new data, the Earth's mass and moment of inertia and the current best estimates of "Reference Normal Mode Data" (available on the Reference Earth Model web site: //mahi.ucsd.edu/Gabi/rem.html). We seek the smallest perturbation to PREM but update the Q-structure as well as the depths of the upper mantle discontinuities (418~km and 660~km as first order discontinuities; 520~km as change in gradient). The best fitting 1D model is transversely isotropic but we also show isotropic models that fit the data to within their errors. We show that the 220~km discontinuity is not required in the isotropic model but that there exists a trade-off between high shear-velocities in the lid and a low-density zone beneath it. We also investigate ways of truncating transverse isotropy without the 220. |