Shear velocity and density of an attenuating earth

The dispersion that must accompany absorption is taken into account in many recent body-wave investigations but has been largely ignored in surface-wave and free-oscillation studies. In order to compare body-wave and free-oscillation data a correction must be made to travel times or periods to account for absorption-related physical dispersion. The correction depends on the frequency and Q of the data and can be as high as 1% which is much larger than the uncertainty of the raw data. Corrected toroidal mode data is inverted to obtain shear velocity and density versus depth. The average shear velocity in the upper 600 km is ∼2% greater than obtained from the uncorrected data. The resulting shear-wave travel times oscillate about the Jeffreys-Bullen values with an average baseline of only +0.5 second. Thus, the discrepancy between body-wave and free-oscillation studies is eliminated