Magma and fluid migration at Yellowstone Caldera in the last three decades inferred from InSAR, leveling and gravity measurements

We studied the Yellowstone caldera geological unrest between 1977 and 2010 by investigating temporal changes in differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), precise spirit leveling and gravity measurements. The analysis of the 1992–2010 displacement time series, retrieved by applying the SBAS InSAR technique, allowed the identification of three areas of deformation: (i) the Mallard Lake (ML) and Sour Creek (SC) resurgent domes, (ii) a region close to the Northern Caldera Rim (NCR), and (iii) the eastern Snake River Plain (SRP). While the eastern SRP shows a signal related to tectonic deformation, the other two regions are influenced by the caldera unrest. We removed the tectonic signal from the InSAR displacements, and we modeled the InSAR, leveling, and gravity measurements to retrieve the best fitting source parameters. Our findings confirmed the existence of different distinct sources, beneath the brittle-ductile transition zone, which have been intermittently active during the last three decades. Moreover, we interpreted our results in the light of existing seismic tomography studies. Concerning the SC dome, we highlighted the role of hydrothermal fluids as the driving force behind the 1977–1983 uplift; since 1983–1993 the deformation source transformed into a deeper one with a higher magmatic component. Furthermore, our results support the magmatic nature of the deformation source beneath ML dome for the overall investigated period. Finally, the uplift at NCR is interpreted as magma accumulation, while its subsidence could either be the result of fluids migration outside the caldera or the gravitational adjustment of the source from a spherical to a sill-like geometr

Full waveform inversion with extrapolated low frequency data

The availability of low frequency data is an important factor in the success of full waveform inversion (FWI) in the acoustic regime. The low frequencies help determine the kinematically relevant, low-wavenumber components of the velocity model, which are in turn needed to avoid convergence of FWI to spurious local minima. However, acquiring data below 2 or 3 Hz from the field is a challenging and expensive task. In this paper we explore the possibility of synthesizing the low frequencies computationally from high-frequency data, and use the resulting prediction of the missing data to seed the frequency sweep of FWI. As a signal processing problem, bandwidth extension is a very nonlinear and delicate operation. It requires a high-level interpretation of bandlimited seismic records into individual events, each of which is extrapolable to a lower (or higher) frequency band from the non-dispersive nature of the wave propagation model. We propose to use the phase tracking method for the event separation task. The fidelity of the resulting extrapolation method is typically higher in phase than in amplitude. To demonstrate the reliability of bandwidth extension in the context of FWI, we first use the low frequencies in the extrapolated band as data substitute, in order to create the low-wavenumber background velocity model, and then switch to recorded data in the available band for the rest of the iterations. The resulting method, EFWI for short, demonstrates surprising robustness to the inaccuracies in the extrapolated low frequency data. With two synthetic examples calibrated so that regular FWI needs to be initialized at 1 Hz to avoid local minima, we demonstrate that FWI based on an extrapolated [1, 5] Hz band, itself generated from data available in the [5, 15] Hz band, can produce reasonable estimations of the low wavenumber velocity models

Anelastic sensitivity kernels with parsimonious storage for adjoint tomography and full waveform inversion

We introduce a technique to compute exact anelastic sensitivity kernels in the time domain using parsimonious disk storage. The method is based on a reordering of the time loop of time-domain forward/adjoint wave propagation solvers combined with the use of a memory buffer. It avoids instabilities that occur when time-reversing dissipative wave propagation simulations. The total number of required time steps is unchanged compared to usual acoustic or elastic approaches. The cost is reduced by a factor of 4/3 compared to the case in which anelasticity is partially accounted for by accommodating the effects of physical dispersion. We validate our technique by performing a test in which we compare the $K_\alpha$ sensitivity kernel to the exact kernel obtained by saving the entire forward calculation. This benchmark confirms that our approach is also exact. We illustrate the importance of including full attenuation in the calculation of sensitivity kernels by showing significant differences with physical-dispersion-only kernels

Space-weighted seismic attenuation mapping of the aseismic source of Campi Flegrei 1983-84 unrest

Peer reviewedPublisher PD