Joint Inversion of Crustal Structure with the Rayleigh Wave Phase Velocity Dispersion and the ZH Ratio

Surface waves are essential for resolving Earth's structure on both regional and global scales, and surface wave data are mostly exploited with velocity dispersion. However, dispersion is mostly sensitive to the integral feature of velocity structure, resulting in ambiguities of the model interpretation. Recently, it has been demonstrated that the ZH amplitude ratio of a Rayleigh wave is an effective approach for providing extra constraints to reduce ambiguity in surface wave inversion. In this paper, we studied the sensitivities of the Rayleigh wave phase velocity dispersion and the ZH ratio with layered crustal structure via forward modeling. The forward modeling experiments indicate that the Rayleigh wave ZH ratio shows different sensitivity as compared to Rayleigh wave phase velocity dispersion. The ZH ratio is more sensitive to the shallower structure compared to phase velocity dispersion of the same period, and the ZH ratio provides independent constraints on the structure. Thus, the combination of these two datasets should help to better constrain the velocity model. A joint inversion tool is developed to jointly invert for the Rayleigh wave phase velocity and the ZH ratio observations. The inversion is based on a Fast Simulated Annealing algorithm, which generates models randomly and can achieve a global minimum without requiring a sensitivity kernel. Joint inversions based on synthetic datasets confirmed that the ZH ratio together with a phase velocity dispersion curve can reduce the non-uniqueness in crustal structure inversion.