REVEAL: A Global Full-Waveform Inversion Model

ABSTRACT We present REVEAL, a global-scale, transversely isotropic full-waveform inversion model. REVEAL builds upon the earlier construction of the long-wavelength Earth (LOWE) model by lowering the minimum period from 100 to 33 s and by more than doubling the number of included earthquakes to 2366. In the course of 305 quasi-Newton iterations, REVEAL assimilated a total of 6,005,727 unique three-component waveforms. The inversion method rests on the combination of a stochastic mini-batch optimization and wavefield-adapted spectral-element meshes. Although the former naturally exploits redundancies in the data set, the latter reduces the cost of wavefield simulations by reducing the effective dimension of the numerical mesh. As a consequence, the average cost of an iteration in this inversion is only around 0.62% of an iteration that uses the complete data set with a standard cubed-sphere-type mesh. We calculated 3D synthetic seismograms using a graphics processing unit-accelerated spectral-element wave propagation solver, accommodating the effects of anelasticity, topography, bathymetry, ocean loading, and ellipticity. For a diverse range of global wavepaths, REVEAL predicts complete three-component seismograms at 33 s period that have not been included in the inversion. This generalization to unseen data suggests applications of REVEAL in event location and characterization, as well as in ground-motion modeling.