In areas with structurally complex geology, tomographic velocity analysis is required to estimate velocities. This paper describes a tomographic velocity analysis algorithm which uses planewave synthesis imaging as a prestack migration. In reflection tomography, prestack migration is required for both event picking and traveltime error computation. Traveltime errors are often measured in the fo...

S U M M A R Y This paper presents a comparison of ray-theoretical and finite-frequency traveltime tomography for compressional waves. Our data set consists of 86 405 long-period P and PP–P traveltimes measured by cross-correlation. The traveltime of a finite-frequency wave is sensitive to anomalies in a hollow banana-shaped region surrounding the unperturbed ray path, with the sensitivity being...

S U M M A R Y Head waves are extremely important in determining the structure of the predominantly layered Earth. While several recent studies have shown the diffractive nature and the 3-D Fréchet kernels of finite-frequency turning waves, analogues of head waves in a continuous velocity structure, the finite-frequency effects and sensitivity kernels of head waves are yet to be carefully examin...

Void detection is challenging due to the complexity of near-surface materials and the limited resolution of geophysical methods. Although multichannel, high-frequency, surface-wave techniques can provide reliable shear (S)-wave velocities in different geological settings, they are not suitable for detecting voids directly based on anomalies of the S-wave velocity because of limitations on the r...

We present three case studies of traveltime tomography applied to regional imaging of the earth's crust and upper mantle. The first case study investigates the imaging of Poisson's ratio using measurements of compressional and shear wave traveltimes. Inversions schemes that jointly fit both types of traveltime data and that selectively damp the compressional to shear wave velocity ratio are sho...

Accurate and efficient traveltime calculation is an important topic in seismic imaging. We present a fast-marching eikonal solver in the tetragonal coordinates (3-D) and trigonal coordinates (2-D), tetragonal (trigonal) fast-marching eikonal solver (TFMES), which can significantly reduce the first-order approximation error without greatly increasing the computational complexity. In the trigonal...