Effects of off great-circle propagation on the phase of long-period surface waves

Abstract

Surface wave phase corrections for departures from great-circle propagation are computed using two-point ray-tracing through the aspherical earth model M84C of Woodhouse & Dziewonski (1984). For Rayleigh and Love waves with periods in the range 100–250 s, we determine whether these corrections provide significant variance reductions in source determinations compared with corrections calculated assuming great-circle propagation through the heterogeneous structure. For most source-receiver geometries, the off great-circle travel-time effects are small (< 10 s) for second and third orbits (e.g. R2 and R3), and their application in source determinations does not significantly reduce the data variance. This suggests that for the loworder heterogeneous models currently available the geometrical optics approximation is valid for long-period low orbit surface waves. Off great-circle phase anomalies increase quasi-linearly with increasing orbit number, indicating that the geometrical optics approximation degrades for higher orbits, which emphasizes the importance of developing higher order approximations for free-oscillation studies.