On the resolution of density anomalies in the Earth’s mantle using spectral fitting of normal-mode data

S U M M A R Y The resolution of the 3-D density structure in the Earth’s deep interior has long eluded geoscientists. High-quality data from digital seismic instruments emplaced this decade have renewed interest in the measurement of low-frequency Earth normal modes with the goal of extracting heterogeneous density structure. Here we perform a series of synthetic experiments aimed at investigating the resolution of lateral variations in the mantle from normal-mode spectral data. Contamination effects between seismic velocities and density are examined in two ways: (1) by using resolution matrices computed from data kernels and (2) by inverting synthetic spectra computed from realistic input Earth models. The first type of experiment assumes that the non-linearity of the inverse problem is weak. No such assumptions are necessary in the second type of tests which, nevertheless concur in their results with the former. These synthetic tests indicate that density structure retrieved from presently available normal-mode data is not reliable. Contamination of seismic velocity structure into the density model space produces patterns that resemble those obtained from inversions of real data. The resulting density models appear to be dependent on a combination of the starting velocity models and the model parametrization.