Disseminating, improving and validating 3-D seismic velocity models for California
Clifford H. ThurberSubmitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14389, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD
I report on progress on three collaborative and inter-related efforts to disseminate, improve, and validate 3-D seismic velocity models for different regions of California, with support from SCEC and the USGS. The main focus is on the northern California region. The dissemination effort aims to incorporate additional northern California 3-D models into the SCEC Community Earth Model (CEM) platform, primarily via the Unified Community Velocity Model (UCVM) platform. To date, the statewide 3-D model of Lin et al. (2010) has been restored in the UCVM and new 3-D Vp and Vs models of the San Francisco Bay (SFB) region (Guo et al., 2025) have been added. Efforts are underway to add the 3-D Vp model of Thurber et al. (2009) for northern California and the 3-D Vp and Vs models of Zeng et al. (2016) for the greater Parkfield region. Improvement efforts involve creating the new SFB region Vp and Vs models of Guo et al. (2025) using joint body wave-surface wave inversion and an improved version of the Fang et al. (2016) code. We are also evaluating a novel idea for taking Rayleigh wave ellipticity modeling results and turning them into "virtual shots" to add to body-wave data sets. Finally, validation efforts are being pursued along two different fronts. One is direct validation of model improvement via wavefield simulations, and the other is an indirect validation by comparing 3-D models obtained with two different joint inversion codes.
Key Words
Dissemination, Improvement, Validation
Citation
Thurber, C. H. (2025, 09). Disseminating, improving and validating 3-D seismic velocity models for California. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.
Related Projects & Working Groups
Community Earth Models (CEM)
