Global S-wave tomography using receiver pairs: An alternative to get rid of earthquake mislocation

International audienceGlobal seismic tomography suffers from uncertainties in earthquake parameters routinely published in seismic catalogues. In particular, errors in earthquake location and origin-time may lead to strong biases in measured body wave delay-times and significantly pollute tomographic models. Common ways of dealing with this issue are to incorporate source parameters as additional unknowns into the linear tomographic equations, or to seek combinations of data to minimize the influence of source mislocations. We propose an alternative, physically-based method to desensitize direct S-wave delay-times to errors in earthquake location and origin-time. Our approach takes advantage of the fact that mislocation delay-time biases depend to first order on the earthquake-receiver azimuth, and to second order on the epicentral distance. Therefore, for every earthquake, we compute S-wave differential delay-times between optimized receiver pairs, such that a large part of their mislocation delay-time biases cancels out (for example origin-time fully subtracts out), while the difference of their sensitivity kernels remains sensitive to the model parameters of interest. Considering realistic, randomly distributed source mislocation vectors, as well as various levels of data noise and different synthetic Earths, we demonstrate that mislocation-related model errors are highly reduced when inverting for such differential delay-times, compared to absolute ones. The reduction is particularly rewarding for imaging the upper-mantle and transition zone. We conclude that using optimized receiver pairs is a suitable, low cost alternative to get rid of errors on earthquake location and origin-time for teleseismic direct S-wave traveltimes. Moreover, it can partly remove unilateral rupture propagation effects in cross-correlation delay-times, since they are similar to mislocation effects