Geology

Engineering

Geodesy

Seismology

Architectural engineering

Joint (building)

Grid

Inversion (geology)

Crust

Computer science

Rayleigh wave

Telecommunications

Tectonics

Geophysics

Surface wave

Seismological Research Letters

Southwest China, located at the southeastern margin of the Tibetan plateau, plays an important role for the plateau growth and its material extrusion. It has complicated tectonic environment and strong seismic activities including the 2008 Wenchuan great earthquake. Numerous geophysical studies have been conducted in southwest China. However, a community velocity model (CVM) in this region is still not available, which makes it difficult to have a consistent catalog of earthquake locations and focal mechanisms and a consistent velocity model for simulating strong ground motions and evaluating earthquake hazards. In this study, we aim at building a high-resolution CVM (both VP and VS) of the crust and uppermost mantle in southwest China along with earthquake locations by joint inversion of body- and surface-wave travel-time data. In total, we have assembled 386,958 P- and 372,662 S-wave first arrival times and nearly 8100 Rayleigh-wave dispersion curves in the period band of 5–50 s. A multigrid strategy is adopted in the joint inversion. A coarser horizontal grid interval of 0.5° is first used and then a finer grid interval of 0.25° is used with initial models interpolated from the coarser-grid inverted velocity models. The spatial resolution of both VP and VS models can reach up to 0.5° horizontally and 10 km vertically according to the checkerboard tests. The comparisons of our inverted VP and VS models with those from other studies show general consistency in large-scale features. The inverted models are further validated by P-wave arrival times from active sources and Rayleigh-wave data. In general, our velocity models show two low-velocity zones in the middle-lower crust and a prominent high-velocity region in between them. Our new models have been served as the first version of the CVM in southwest China (SWChinaCVM-1.0) for future studies.

The Community Velocity Model V.1.0 of Southwest China, Constructed from Joint Body- and Surface-Wave Travel-Time Tomography