Community Computational Platforms for Developing Three-Dimensional Models of Earth Structure, Phase II

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The principal investigators of this proposal are a collaboration of seismologists, computer scientists, and structural geologists who are developing computational platforms that can combine seismological and geological information into three dimensional (3D) representations of Earth structure. They derive the seismological information from earthquakes, controlled-source experiments, and observations of the ambient seismic field generated by ocean waves and other near-surface disturbances. They derive the geological information from an even wider variety of sources: field mapping, electromagnetic remote sensing, geotechnical measurements, drilling and well-logging, fault trenching, and laboratory measurements of material properties. The systematic integration of such diverse datasets into unified structural representations (USRs) is a key problem of geoinformatics. The goal of this project is to develop for community use the complex cyberinfrastructure needed to manage the ?USR lifecycle?, including the effective application of high performance computing (HPC) to invert joint datasets in the iterative improvement of USRs. The lifecycle is initiated by the integration of several components into a starting model; the starting model is refined by full-3D tomographic inversion of seismic waveform data; the refined model is validated for its proposed applications and then disseminated to user communities. This new model becomes the main component of the starting model for the next lifecycle.