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Morgan Paul Moschetti

Graduate Research Assistant
Center for Imaging the Earth's Interior

Department of Physics
Campus Box 390
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0390
Tel: 303-735-3048
Fax: 303-492-7935
morgan.moschetti@colorado.edu


NOTE: The ambient noise website has been moved to http://ciei.colorado.edu/ambient_noise. Pleaese update your links.

I am working with Mike Ritzwoller and others on several problems in the western United States (US) that are broadly related to the structure and dynamics of the crust and uppermost mantle. We address these problems using ambient noise surface wave tomography. Developments in ambient noise tomography (ANT) over the past several years now allow relatively straightforward calculation of inter-station Green's functions from long time series. By applying these techniques to stations from the USArray Transportable Array (TA) component of EarthScope, and other available regional network stations, we have produced a data set comprised of over 100,000 inter-station paths (and counting), spanning the western US.

study region

Ambient noise techniques permit the measurement of seismic surface wave group and phase velocities at shorter periods than are typically observed from teleseismic measurements because of the preferred scattering and attenuation of shorter period waves. The short and intermediate period (6 - 25 sec) measurements from ANT have an increased sensitivity to crustal velocity structures and allow us to invert dispersion curves for 3-D crustal and uppermost mantle shear-velocities across broad regions.

This work extends the original proof-of-concept results by Nikolai Shapiro. Application to the USArray TA as it moves eastward across the country promises to reveal broad crustal features at an unprecedented level.