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The high-resolution community velocity model V2.0 of southwest China, constructed by joint body and surface wave tomography of data recorded at temporary dense arrays

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Abstract

The Sichuan-Yunnan area is located at the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, where tectonic movement is strong with deep and large faults distributed in a staggered manner, which results in strong seismic activities and severe earthquake hazards. Since the 21st century, several earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or above occurred in this region, which have caused huge casualties and economic losses, especially the 2008 Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake. At present, earthquake monitoring and source parameter inversion, strong earthquake hazard analysis and disaster assessment are still the focus of seismological researches in the Sichuan-Yunnan region. Regional high-precision 3D community velocity models are fundamental for these studies. In this paper, by assembling seismic observations at permanent seismic stations and several temporary dense seismic arrays in this region, we obtained about 7.06 million body wave travel time data (including absolute and differential travel times) using a newly developed artificial intelligence body wave arrival time picking method and about 100,000 Rayleigh wave phase velocity dispersion data in the period range of 5–50 s from ambient noise cross-correlation technique. Based on this abundant dataset, we obtained the three-dimensional high resolution Vp and Vs model in the crust and uppermost mantle of southwest (SW) China by adopting the joint body and surface wave travel time tomography method considering the topography effect starting from the first version of community velocity model in SW China (SWChinaCVM-1.0). Compared to SWChinaCVM-1.0, this newly determined velocity model has higher resolution and better data fitness. It is accepted by the China Seismic Experimental Site as the second version of the community velocity model in SW China (SWChinaCVM-2.0). The new model shows strong lateral heterogeneities in the shallow crust. Two disconnected low velocity zones are observed in the middle to lower crust, which is located in the Songpan-Ganzi block and the northern Chuandian block to the west of the Longmenshan-Lijiang-**ao**he fault, and beneath the **aojiang fault zone, respectively. The inner zone of the Emeishan large igneous province (ELIP) exhibits a high velocity anomaly, which separates the two aforementioned low velocity anomalies. Low velocity anomaly is also shown beneath the Tengchong volcano. The velocity structures in the vicinity of the 2008 Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake, the 2013 Ms7.0 Lushan earthquake and the 2017 Ms7.0 Jiuzhaigou earthquake mainly show high Vp and Vs anomalies and the mainshocks are basically located at the transition zone between the high and low velocity anomalies. Along with the segmentation characteristics of seismic activity, we suggest that areas with significant changes in velocity structures, especially in active fault zones, might have a greater potential to generate moderate to strong earthquakes.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge two anonymous reviewers and the responsible editor for their constructive comments on our manuscript. The seismic phase reports and waveform data of permanent stations are provided by International Earthquake Science Data Center at Institute of Geophysics (doi: https://doi.org/10.11998/SeisDmc/SN) and data of ChinArray are provided by China Seismic Array Data Management Center at Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration (doi: https://doi.org/10.12001/ChinArray.Data). Figures in this study are plotted using GMT and Matplotlib. The community velocity model SWChinaCVM-2.0 obtained in this study can be downloaded at https://github.com/liuyingustc/SWChinaCVM-V2.0. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42004034, U1839205, 42125401), the Special Fund of the Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration (Grant No. DQJB22Z01), and the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2021YFC3000602).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Seismology and Physics of Earth’s Interior, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Ying Liu, Zhiqi Zhang, Huajian Yao & Haijiang Zhang

  2. Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Bei**g, 100081, China

    Ziye Yu, Weitao Wang & Lihua Fang

  3. Mengcheng National Geophysical Observatory, Mengcheng, 233500, China

    Huajian Yao & Haijiang Zhang

  4. CAS Center for Excellence in Comparative Planetology, Mengcheng, 233500, China

    Huajian Yao & Haijiang Zhang

  5. School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, 519080, China

    Hongjian Fang

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  1. Ying Liu
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  2. Ziye Yu
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Correspondence to Huajian Yao or Weitao Wang.

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Liu, Y., Yu, Z., Zhang, Z. et al. The high-resolution community velocity model V2.0 of southwest China, constructed by joint body and surface wave tomography of data recorded at temporary dense arrays. Sci. China Earth Sci. 66, 2368–2385 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-022-1161-7

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