Global observation of off-great-circle propagation of Long-Period surface waves

In the current generation of global dispersion maps of surface waves, the long-wavelength structure seems to be very well determined. There is general agreement in the patterns of global phase velocity anomalies up to harmonic degree l≃6. However, the shorter-wavelength structure varies significantly between published maps, and it appears that this part of the models depends strongly on the inversion technique and on the data set of surface-wave dispersion (usually phase measurements). Polarization data depend on the lateral gradient of phase velocity and hence are more sensitive to shorter-wavelength structure than phase data; thus, including these data should enhance resolution. In this paper, I demonstrate that polarization data of long-period surface waves (≥80 s), as a function of frequency, can be reliably measured using a multitaper technique. The resulting off-great-circle arrival angles of the surface-wave packets are relatively easy to interpret within a ray-theoretical framework. Our data base of three-component recordings is now large enough to provide useful constraints on global dispersion maps, particularly on the shorter-wavelength parts. Apart from the phase velocity model itself, a possible misorientation of the horizontal components at each station is included in a non-linear inversion as an additional independent model parameter. This gives a significant improvement in the fit to the data. Misorientations of more than 3° are probable for at least four of the 37 stations investigated.