Sebastian Noe

and 12 more

Geological interpretations, earthquake source inversions and ground motion modelling, among other applications, require models that jointly resolve crustal and mantle structure. With the second generation of the Collaborative Seismic Earth Model (CSEM2), we present a global multi-resolution tomographic Earth model that serves this purpose. The model evolves through successive regional- and global-scale refinements. While the first generation aggregated regional models, with this study, we ensure consistency between all individual submodels, resulting in a model that accurately explains wave propagation across scales. Recent regional tomographic models were incorporated, comprising continental-scale inversions for Asia and Africa, as well as regional inversions for the Western US, Central Andes, Iran, and Southeast Asia. Across all regional refinements, over 793,000 unique source-receiver pairs contributed. Moreover, the long-wavelength Earth model (LOWE) introduces large-scale structures outside of pre-existing local refinements. A global full-waveform inversion over a total of 194 iterations with a minimum period of 50 s on a large data set of 2,423 earthquakes and over 6 million source-receiver pairs ensures that regional updates in the crust and uppermost mantle correctly translate into updates of deeper, global-scale structure. To test the performance of CSEM2, we evaluate waveform fits between observed and synthetic seismograms at 50 s for an independent data set on the global scale, and on the regional scale for lower periods. We show that we can accurately simulate waveforms within and across the regional refinements, maintaining the original resolution of the submodels embedded in the global framework.