It’s JULY?!?!?!

July 6th, 2010

I can't believe it's July.  I only have a little over a month left here and I'm feeling VERY behind!  I haven't even started working with actual data.  Hopefully I will get to that by tomorrow.  BUT, on a good note I am completely done with synthetic and forward modeling.  We found from the synthetic modeling that the kernels of the Love waves look too similar to the reference models so it's nearly impossible to figure out where an anomaly is located at depth.  As such, we now have a new focus for my project which seems more reasonable with the minimal time I have left here.  Below is an introduction from my journal:

The goal of this project is to quantitatively explore the radially anisotropic shear velocity structure of the region surrounding Hawaii from the analysis of Rayleigh and Love wave phase velocity data of the PLUME deployment.  From previous experimentation, we know that there is an anisotropic anomaly located in the central Pacific plate (Ekstrom and Dziewonski (1998)).  While these studies have used global isotropic S-wave velocity models to compare VSV and VSH at depth, we hope to more accurately distinguish the flow pattern of the upper mantle around Hawaii through two-step 3D inversions of Raleigh and Love wave dispersion measurements. In support of the plume model, we expect to find a change in anisotropy under Hawaii indicative of vertical flow (VSH<VSV).

More to come soon!