3D Bayesian Variational Surface Wave Tomography and Application to the Southwest China

Summary Seismic surface wave tomography uses surface wave information to obtain velocity structures in the subsurface. Due to data noise and nonlinearity of the problem, surface wave tomography often has non-unique solutions. It is therefore required to quantify uncertainty of the results in order to better interpret the resulting images. Bayesian inference is the most widely-used method for this purpose. However, the commonly-used Monte Carlo methods require huge computational cost and remains intractable in high-dimensional problems. Variational inference uses optimization to solve Bayesian inverse problems, and therefore can be more efficient in the case of large datasets and high-dimensional parameter spaces. Variational inference has been widely applied to 2-D phase velocity map inversion. In this study, we extend the method to 3-D surface wave tomography by directly inverting for 3-D spatial seismic velocity structures from frequency-dependent travel time measurements. Specifically, we apply three variational methods, mean-field automatic differential variational inference (mean-field ADVI), physically structured variational inference (PSVI) and stochastic Stein varational gradient descent (sSVGD) to surface wave tomographic problems using both synthetic data and real data in the Southwest China. The results show that all methods can provide accurate velocity mean estimates, while sSVGD produces more reasonable uncertainty estimates than mean-field ADVI and PSVI because of Gaussian assumption used in these methods. In the real data case, the variational methods provide more detailed velocity structures than those obtained using traditional linearized methods, along with reliable uncertainty estimates. We therefore conclude that variational surface wave tomography can be applied fruitfully to many realistic problems.