Inversion for laterally heterogeneous earth structure using a laterally heterogeneous starting model: preliminary results

We present a method for inverting for laterally heterogeneous earth structure with respect to a laterally heterogeneous starting model. Our method makes it possible to perform iterative linearized inversion of seismic waveform data; in contrast, previous methods have been limited to a single iteration in which the entire laterally heterogeneous part of the model is treated as a perturbation. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by inverting for low angular order (s = 1 to s = 4) laterally heterogeneous upper mantle structure with respect to a laterally heterogeneous starting model, using data from the IDA network.