Department of Physics,
Univ. of Colorado, Boulder;
Boulder, CO 80309-0390
resovsky@rey.colorado.edu
303-492-7075
poster/oral:
We report on the construction and characteristics of a new catalogue of normal mode structure coefficients below 3 mHz. Seismic spectra obtained from the GSN, GEOSCOPE, GDSN, and IDA networks following 35 very large earthquakes dating from 1977 - 1995 have been analyzed to yield structure coefficient estimates for 90 multiplets. Improvements in data quality and quantity as well as technical advances in normal mode spectral fitting have resulted in coefficient estimates at structural degrees as high as 12 and at odd degrees. A Monte Carlo error estimation procedure appears to produce reasonable uncertainty estimates. This catalogue is useful to test existing mantle models and is straightforward to use in seismic inversions. We believe that it will prove most useful in placing constraints on mantle structures which are most poorly sampled by surface and body waves; namely at depths between about 500 and 2000 km where current global models disagree most appreciably. Research in the next two years will concentrate on extending the catalogue to 5 mHz. The current catalogue is available at the following web site:
http://phys-geophys.colorado.edu/geophysics/nm.dir/nm.html. We plan to add software to facilitate the use of the catalogue in testing mantle models and in inversions by other researchers.