Imaging Upper Mantle Anisotropic Structure Using Teleseismic Shear Wave Delays and Splitting Intensity: Application to the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Despite the well known anisotropic structure of Earth’s upper mantle, the effect of seismic anisotropy on the construction of body wave shear velocity models remains largely ignored. Ignoring anisotropic heterogeneity can introduce significant model artefacts that may be misinterpreted as compositional and thermal heterogeneities. While effective anisotropic imaging strategies that improve model reconstruction have been developed for P-wave delay times, no such general framework exists for S-waves partly because, unlike P-waves, there is not a simple ray-based methodology for predicting S-wave travel-times through anisotropic media. Here, we apply a new methodology for the inversion of relative shear wave delay times and splitting intensity measurements for arbitrarily oriented hexagonally anisotropic model parameters using data collected across the western United States and Cascadia subduction system. We detail the data analysis procedure required for making measurements of shear wave observables suitable for anisotropic inversions (e.g. determination of incoming polarisation directions). We then present a preliminary anisotropic shear wave velocity model for Cascadia and compare the results to purely isotropic images. The imaged anisotropic heterogeneity is compared to the well-established patterns in shear wave splitting parameters observed in the study area.