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EARTHQUAKE ›› 2020, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (3): 52-64.doi: 10.12196/j.issn.1000-3274.2020.03.005

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A Review of Adjoint Tomography and Its Application in Earth’s Interior Imaging

XIAO Zhuo1,2, GAO Yuan2   

  1. 1. Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100081, China;
    2. Key Laboratory of Earthquake Prediction, Institute of Earthquake Forecasting, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing 100036, China
  • Received:2019-03-25 Online:2020-07-31 Published:2020-07-28

Abstract: Numerical simulation techniques and adjoint method lead to the successful application of adjoint tomography in both regional and global full waveform tomography. Based on the spectral element method, adjoint tomography adopts full three-dimensional model as initial model for waveform modelling and calculates gradients efficiently through interaction between forward wavefield and adjoint wavefield. Owing to the power of high-performance computing, adjoint tomography utilizes full-wave tomography at large scale. Compared with traditional tomography techniques, adjoint tomography can describe the subsurface anomalies more detailed and comprehensively, so it is more favorable in deep dynamics research. Here we firstly introduce the basic theory of adjoint tomography, its workflow of implementation, and then we give a review of its worldwide applications, while finally a brief prospect of future developments is discussed at the end of this article.

Key words: Adjoint tomography, Waveform modeling, Earth’s interior, Spectral element method

CLC Number: